Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  THAT CHEEVER MANAGED to pursue his Sing Sing duties for two years is more than a little remarkable. At home, the situation deteriorated almost daily. Each morning, as Cheever put it, he did “everything but shout ‘fire’ “ to clear the pantry so he could get at the bottles, and his body continued to bloat in protest. Shortly after he began teaching that summer, he was stopped by police while driving home—very, very slowly—from a dinner party at the Cowleys’ house in Connecticut. “Put me in jail!” he angrily expostulated. “If it's a crime to drive carefully, put me in jail!” The policemen, who couldn't fail to notice that the gentleman reeked of alcohol, diffidently insisted he take a Breathalyzer test. A few weeks later, Cheever recounted the sequel while thanking an admirer for sending him a copy of Inquire at Deacon Giles's Distillery, a temperance tract by an alleged nineteenth-century forebear, George Barrell Cheever: “I trust he hasn't heard—in heaven, his resting place—that his great-nephew was arrested last month for drunken driving. I didn't hit anything but the State Police stopped me at two in the morning and asked me to breathe into a bag. The bag exploded.”

  Cheever's license was suspended for sixty days, and so he had to ride shotgun when he went to Treetops later in July for his daughter's twenty-eighth birthday. One reason he was willing to make the trip—however “painful” in a logistic sense—was that he'd gone out of his way to get Susan a special present. As she remembered, “[He] knew I was a fan of New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren, and he surprised me with a drawing Koren had done at his request featuring a crowd of furry creatures shouting ‘Happy Birthday, Susie.’ “ It was a festive occasion for all but Cheever, who hadn't been to the Winternitz estate in almost ten years and felt haunted by the place. While Mary and her brother Bill swapped stories about their illustrious father, Cheever ruminated (as ever) about how the “great man” had beaten his children with belts and so on—the ur-trauma which explained so many of his difficulties with Mary. “Thirty years ago,” he sadly reminisced, “when we were courting, I used to leave the guesthouse, where everyone seemed asleep, and walk, naked, through the woods to this cottage, where we made love.” Thirty years later, the cottage was a less hospitable place, and Cheever caught an early ride home with Susan the next day, huddled with dogs and a bottle of Scotch in the cramped backseat of her car.

  That year Mary was writing some of the best poetry of her life, she thought, and Cheever tried to be encouraging. Certainly his public utterances on the subject were meant to be politic. “Mm-hm,” he answered when asked on TV whether he read her poems. “Where is she published?” the interviewer pursued. “Not often,” Cheever said, after a flustered pause; “and I can't remember the names of the magazines.” At the time she'd never been published at all, though several years later her poems would be collected in The Need for Chocolate, and Cheever always declared the book “first-rate” when asked. “Oh, she writes about men, women, children, dogs, landscapes,” he ventured in a 1981 interview. “She writes not at all, as far as I can figure out, about her husband.” This was very disingenuous; as it happened, Mary's favorite poem was about her marriage, and Cheever despised it. Though it was originally titled (circa 1971) “A Long Time Married,” she changed the title to “Gorgon”—the better to suggest (as she explained) the “very powerful, slightly malevolent woman” who persisted in her husband's imagination, and appeared in his fiction, regardless of anything she said or did. The poem begins: “I have sometimes complained, husband, / that as you feinted, shadowboxed and blindly / jived to that misty monolithic woman in your mind /I have been battered, drowned under your blows.” But that wasn't the part that bothered Cheever. Rather, the narrator mentions how her husband “fuss[es]/and nicker[s] at [her] breasts”—which reminded Cheever of the time Mary had asked him (rhetorically) if he could “imagine how revolting it is to have an old man kiss her breasts.” Anyway, he thought “Gorgon” was in the worst possible taste, which might account for his tight grimacing smile (ten years later) while declaring her poetry “first-rate” on TV

  He was less tactful about her latest job. Since leaving Briarcliff that year, she'd begun teaching an adult creative-writing workshop at the local high school. Sometimes she'd announce at dinner that one of her students (sensitive businessmen and the like) was especially gifted, and, if others seemed receptive, she'd produce an actual sample of prose and read it aloud at table. Cheever would light a cigarette. “Oh yes,” he'd murmur, “oh that's brilliance for you all right”—managing to suggest not only that the work was ghastly, but that the person whose teaching had resulted in such work was also a fair subject for ridicule. Which is to say, these impromptu readings had a way of ending badly: Mary would leave the table in tears, or else Cheever would rise with a sort of final, drunken exasperation and retire upstairs (followed by elephantine crashing noises as he negotiated the narrow halls). “Who do you think you are, she asks,” Cheever wrote of one such battle. “The voice is tremulous, musical, highly emotional. What am I. An imposter, usurper, a broken down alcoholic. I am your husband, I say.”

  Given his writer's block and dicey domestic situation, Cheever spent almost the entire autumn of 1971 on the road. After a visit to Whiskey Island in September, he proceeded to Yaddo for the annual meeting and had a very satisfactory tryst with a painter exactly half his age. “There's something about a drinking bond,” the woman said, remembering the episode. “I've been sober for twenty years, but I was a bit of a drinker to say the least.” Cheever was in good form and made the woman laugh, and perhaps in tipsy gratitude (since she needed a laugh at the time) she performed fellatio on him—thereby supplanting both Shana Alexander and Hope Lange as Cheever's top dream girl for the next two or three years. “My incantation is that I am lying in a four poster bed with S——,” he wrote almost a year later.* “It is a large bed. This is in her Vermont farmhouse.” And then, the year after that: “I think of S——. Why do I love a girl with such a husky voice, I ask. She kisses me. Why do I love the oldest man in the world.” The woman (like certain others) was bemused to learn that she'd played such a prominent role in Cheever's fantasy life; as she pointed out, their meetings after Yaddo were “casual at best.”

  In October, he flew first-class to Chicago—compliments of Hugh Hefner—for the Playboy International Writers’ Convocation, where he joined the likes of Sean O'Faolain, Alberto Moravia, John Kenneth Galbraith, and some sixty other Playboy contributors to discuss such topics as “Paranoia: The New Urban Life Style” and “The Future of Sex.” The gathering was so high-minded that, during parties at the Mansion, Bunnies were chaperoned by a former housemother at Vassar. Cheever availed himself of the good liquor and kept smiling. Buttonholed by an earnest young writer who asked if he'd ever altered his work to suit an editor, Cheever gravely replied, “Not since I came into my inheritance.” Richard Todd, reporting on the event for The Atlantic Monthly, noticed how Cheever “nodded elaborately in approval” when Arthur C. Clarke (of Space Odyssey fame) described a future in which offices would be obsolete: “Don't commute, communicate!” he exhorted the panel, while Cheever sent a paper airplane gliding down the table. Hef presented his guests with Playboy credit cards and VIP International Keys, but the highlight for Cheever was meeting his beloved Bellow at the Riviera Health Club. He arrived while Bellow was still on the racquetball court, and agreed to chat afterward in the steam room—an Olympian encounter that Cheever evoked six years later, while presenting Bellow with yet another award: “Saul appeared from the clouds, stark naked and wearing a copious wreath of steam. I stood in my own cloud. As we shook hands I said, as I am pleased to say tonight, that our friendship is obviously not of this world.”

  And finally, in November, Cheever was invited back to the Soviet Union for Dostoevski's 150th-birthday celebration, for which he brought his younger son as companion and caretaker. The two had never been alone together for a long vacation—unchaperoned, as it were—and, looking back, Federico regarded this as perhaps the time he really “got to know [his] fa
ther.” On the flight to Moscow, they sat together for as long as it took for the seatbelt light to go off, whereupon Cheever adjourned to the back of the plane for cocktails; when he didn't return, Federico stood peering into the gloom until he spotted his father (animatedly talking) seated beside a female passenger (listening). Landing in a blizzard, they were met by old friends and interpreters, Giorgio Breitburd and Frieda Lurie, who explained that the Dostoevski festival was in Riga and that Cheever would not like it in Riga; rather they would go to Tbilisi. “[A]nd so,” Cheever later recalled, “while the speeches, concerts and parades in honor of Dostoevski raged in snowbound Riga, we swam in the rivers of southwestern Georgia and ate Homeric feasts.” The sheer quantity of food bordered on life-threatening—almost twenty courses at a single meal—but the “primary indoor sport” was drinking, and Federico promptly got drunk for the first time in his life. Before he could really savor the experience, though, his even more sodden father lost control of his bowels. As the adult Federico reflected, “Washing out his pants in the bathtub of a hotel room in the Soviet Union sticks with me as one of the high points or low points of my role as keeper of my father.”

  But of course Federico had been taking care of his father for years now (finding his glasses and car keys; helping him stagger down the hill from Mrs. Zagreb's house), so that no chore was entirely a surprise, and for the most part they got along fine. In fact, Cheever liked to say that the only serious fight (verbal) they ever had was in Leningrad—on the banks of the Neva, amid swirling gusts of snow—because Federico wanted to see the battleship Aurora and he didn't. “If you think,” Cheever shouted, “that I am unable to abandon a fourteen year old boy in a blizzard in a strange country you are greatly mistaken.” On returning to their hotel, however, Cheever bought “an uncommon display of caviar” and the two embraced, apologized, and tucked in. Also, back in Moscow, Cheever brought his son along for a lavish dinner with Yevtushenko, who appeared in a floor-length otter coat with mink trim and presented the boy with a bottle of pepper vodka to help cure his cold. As ever, the poet served as a wistful reminder that writers were heroic figures in Russia. At the restaurant, he breezed past a line of freezing would-be patrons out on the sidewalk, and while driving in the snow he made a wild U-turn in the middle of a busy street, a maneuver that (in stark contrast to Cheever's recent treatment by the New York State Police) was regarded as little more than a winsome flourish: “Write more poetry!” said an affable traffic cop, once he caught a glimpse of the driver.

  By the time Cheever got around to calling Tanya Litvinov, both he and Federico were exhausted. Cheever had been drinking even more than his son realized: “[I] kept ducking into closets, toilets, etc.,” he wrote Exley “Glug, Glug. Even in the Kremlin”—that is, even during a visit with President Nikolai Podgorny, who proudly showed off a shoeshine machine in his office. Unused to drinking himself, and never mind the eating, Federico had come down with raging diarrhea and was glumly consuming large brown tablets pressed on him by Yevtushenko. As for Litvinov, she'd recently lost a front tooth and looked shabby; her mother told her she was “mad” to go out looking like that, but she loved Cheever and thought she'd never see him again, so she stuck a piece of wax to her gums and met him at the Hotel Ukraine. The wax dissolved. “It was awful,” she remembered. “My tooth was missing. John was drunk. The hotel restaurant was miserable. And Fred with his brown pills. Suddenly John opened his pocketbook to show me all his money, which he wanted to give me so I could buy a coat. I was furious. I said, ‘Look, if you want to give me money for samizdat [underground publications], I'll be really glad.’ “ Cheever—obliged to be a good guest of the nation, and always a little worried that he'd be kidnapped and sent to Siberia—clapped his wallet shut.

  “The flight back from Moscow is painful,” he wrote. “A gray day.”

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE Cheever left for the Playboy conference, Zinny Schoales choked to death while eating a steak sandwich. “The face is haggard,” Cheever noted of his old friend shortly before her death. “Alcohol and pain.” To be sure, Zinny's last days were bleak. She used to say that she stayed interested in life by reading the obituaries first thing in the morning to see how many more of her old friends had died; then, revived somewhat by coffee and cigarettes, she'd spend the rest of the day tippling. Her children were grown up and gone away; her philandering husband traveled the world for months at a time. Zinny told Cheever she considered murdering the man, and once left photographs on the coffee table of a female praying mantis devouring its mate. “Z. is dead,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “It was a relationship in which I think I took more than I gave.” At the memorial service, Cheever delivered a eulogy that Zinny's older daughter remembered as “astounding”—in the middle of which a man arrived to fix the grandfather clock, dismayed to find that its owner had departed from the cares of this world.

  By then Cheever could hardly afford to lose a stalwart confidante like Zinny, with whom he had more than a few things in common. “The company I used to keep when I was alone has scattered,” he reflected, a few months after her death. The Boyers had moved to Guatemala shortly after his recent visit to Whiskey Island (“when you left you seem to have pulled the plug,” Cheever wrote them), George Biddle was enfeebled and soon to die, and the rest of Cheever's friends could only take him in measured doses, if at all. It wasn't that he was a mean drunk—though he often was—so much as a boring, pathetic one. At parties his drawling accent would become incoherent as he told the same stories over and over, laughing at his own garbled punch lines, and almost invariably lapsing into pidgin Italian. One day his fellow Friday Clubber Tom Glazer came over to say that his friends were worried about him. Cheever had always regarded Glazer as an oaf, but now he was almost touched: “If he is worried about me he must like me. Cha cha.” Subsequently he introduced the folksinger to Mary (who'd known him for many years) as follows: “I'd like you to meet my very great and good friend, Tom Glazer.” Then he whispered, “I have no friends.”

  There was little reason to go to New York anymore, though Cheever was sometimes bored and lonely enough to suffer the miseries of train travel. “Wouldn't you rather talk than read?” he'd ask fellow passengers, desperate for any distraction. Usually they preferred to read, though some would pause a moment to point out that Cheever was drunk. And if he made it all the way into New York, the “painful alienation” that had roused him to go in the first place would only grow worse. Maxwell was cold these days, and other friends had gone or changed. “What has happened to this place where I used so happily to pound the sidewalks?” he mused. “Where has my city gone, where shall I look for it? … In the steam room at the Biltmore, in L[ennie Field]'s panelled apartment, in the skating rink, in the Park, in the Plaza … ?”

  And so he stayed mostly in Ossining, though summers were almost unbearable, since Mary went to New Hampshire and he didn't have so much as a warm body to cook for him. “I am one of those lonely men you see eating London Broil in Chinese restaurants” was a constant refrain, especially when cadging meals from sympathetic neighbors. “I have entertained John Cheever most of the summer,” Mary Dirks reported in a letter to friends. “[H]e drinks far far too much and one memorable evening I had to pick him up bodily from the terrace and stuff him with food, after which we managed to have a good long talk about American writers and the gossip that surrounds such creatures as Bellow and Updike and poor dead O'Hara.” Cheever loathed Mary Dirks, and it is sobering to reflect just how wretched he must have been to sing for his supper thus. Indeed, he might well have succeeded in drinking himself to death, or having some nasty accident, were it not for the constant shadowing presence of his younger son. More and more, Federico had become the father and John the wayward boy: the latter had to be told not to swim naked in other people's pools, not to use the chainsaw when drunk—on and on—while the former patiently absorbed the insults Cheever inflicted on whosoever presumed to look after him. “Both Susie and I grant [Federico] absolute maturi
ty,” Cheever remarked as a sober man, mindful of the burdens he'd placed on his son. “We both feel that, in his earlier life, he had a successful but unbrilliant business career, married twice and raised seven children.”

  In the midst of that endless summer of 1972, Cheever wrote, “What I would like is some nice, clean heterosexual companion. Should I advertise?” What he got was Donald Lang, who fit the stated requirements imperfectly at best, but in other respects suited Cheever just fine. When Lang first got out of prison, Cheever had driven him to a halfway house in Poughkeepsie, but now he was back in Ossining, living in a tiny bedroom at the Dirkses’ house; a talented carpenter and electrician, he worked for a local theater company and did odd jobs for Cheever and his friends. “Are we going to feed the thief [il ladro], too?” Iole would ask while serving lunch, though soon enough she and everyone else got used to him. For a long time he'd “blow in” almost every day—or disappear for weeks, according to whim—and he and Cheever would do the same things Cheever did with any friend: drink on the porch, walk in the woods, watch baseball, or take pool-hopping treks à la “The Swimmer” (though some of Cheever's wealthier neighbors balked at having the wiry ex-con romp in their pools). Cheever did his best to help Lang acclimate to the outside world. He'd discreetly show him, by example, how to comport himself at cocktail parties and such, though Lang continued to prefer a more raffish element. Usually he hung out at a black bar in Ossining called the Orchid Lounge, and one night he got in a disagreement that resulted in his beating a man with a crowbar. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Lang called me from jail early Tuesday morning and I spent three hours (in my very best suit) talking to the backs of black and white police officers. … At around noon I got to a judge, who set bail. I got the cash and out came Lang, unshaven, unwashed and carrying his shoe-laces. I wondered what your reaction would be, he said. Say thank you, said I. Thank you, said he, and we, for the second time, stepped out of jail into the sun. …”