Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  That said, The World of Apples received some of the best reviews of Cheever's career, his admirers seeming to realize that the time was ripe to rally support for such a superlative (and evidently discouraged) writer, especially after the beating he'd taken over Bullet Park. “Yes, this collection may give comfort to Mr. Cheever's detractors,” wrote his old friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily Times. “But it also gives aid to those of us who have always thought of him as our foremost writer of short fiction, as our most telling explorer of the geography of the heart.” Both the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World featured extravagant front-page encomiums, by Larry Woiwode and D. Keith Mano respectively: “Cheever is as much a master of the short form as Chekhov, and should be recognized as such,” said Woiwode; Mano likened the author to Proust. Cheever was naturally gratified: “Apples seems to have done much better than Bullet Park,” he wrote a friend. “I got a spate of reviews yesterday in which I am praised, all across the country, for my sophistication, my insouciance, my elegance and charm.”

  The moral support came at a good time. For several months now, along with the usual dizziness and chest pains, Cheever had found it harder and harder to breathe; it was especially bad in the morning, though he'd conveniently discovered that whiskey alleviated the problem somewhat. On the morning of May 12, however, he seemed to be suffocating: coughing uncontrollably, he lay abed quaffing Scotch and smoking cigarettes in hope of some relief, until his family persuaded him to go to the Phelps emergency room. As his doctor, Ray Mutter, remembered, “All the cardiologists and internists and everybody were swarming all over him to try to get him out of [heart] failure.” Cheever was found to be suffering from “dilated cardiomyopathy,” an often alcohol-related condition in which the left ventricle fails to eject blood at a proper rate, drowning the lungs and causing the heart to enlarge. Had he waited a little longer to go to the hospital—another drink, another cigarette—he would almost certainly have died.

  For three days he lay calmly recovering in the Intensive Care Unit, and then (“like clockwork,” said Mutter) he lapsed into delirium tremens, which had killed his unfortunate grandfather Aaron. Because Cheever's heart was too weak to withstand heavy doses of tranquilizers, he was in for a long bout—almost five days—during which his foremost hallucination was that he was in a Soviet prison somewhere in Moscow. He thought the intercom speaker above his bed was a Bible they wouldn't let him read, that the rumbling food carts were prisoners being trucked from one place to another. In a panic, he yanked tubes out of his arms and lashed out, physically and otherwise, at anyone who came near him. Susan brought him a copy of the Times Book Review with the Woiwode rave on the cover, which Cheever thought was a confession he was supposed to sign; he cursed her and threw it on the floor. Meanwhile Federico patiently explained, over and over, that they weren't in a Moscow prison (“if you've ever been to Phelps Memorial Hospital,” he later remarked, “you'd know that's not the most implausible hallucination you could come up with”), and when his father demanded proof, he retrieved a sign written in English: “Oxygen: No Smoking.”

  However in extremis, Cheever did not forget his own importance* and was very high-handed toward the hospital staff (or Soviet jailers, as it were). Susan worried that he'd be treated roughly if left unattended, and insisted that at least one family member stay by his bed whenever possible. Even the estranged Ben was pressed into service (over his wife's objection): at one point he noticed his father groping about the sheets for a cigarette; then the latter espied what he thought were the lights of a tavern (actually a nurses’ station), and asked his son to trot over and get him a pack of Marlboros and a martini. As Ben wrote in the Letters, his father's voice became “haughty and crisp” when Ben tried to explain where they were:

  “Are you completely without imagination and initiative?” he asked. “If that is not a bar, then why don't you go and find one? And when you've found one, if you're capable of finding a bar in a state that is crammed with them, then why don't you buy that pack of cigarettes for me and a double martini?”

  “I don't think I should, Daddy.”

  “Well, then, I'll just get up and do it myself,” he said. …

  Then he started to get up. This excited the heart monitor, and I was afraid of what the oxygen tubes would do to his nose, so I grabbed the rail of the bed and made a barrier of myself. First he struggled, then he lay back down. Then he hit me in the chest with his forearm. It didn't hurt, but it did surprise me. He was furious. “You've always been a disappointment as a son,” he said.

  Finally, Cheever was moved to a barred bed and placed in a webbed straitjacket. With almost laudable bravado, he managed to fish a razor out of his bedside table and cut himself free, then he laboriously squirmed his way out through a hole at the foot of his bed and collapsed onto the floor. “This brought the cops,” he wrote, “and I was put into a second straitjacket—leather with brass bindings and four padlocks.” When the cardiologist visited that night, Cheever roared, “I've been shackled!”

  After some three rocky weeks in the ICU, Cheever's heart began to improve. Applauded for his “spectacular” recovery, he celebrated by wheeling himself into the hall at three in the morning and having a cigarette with his son-in-law. Around this time Jack Leggett called him at the hospital and told him to focus on getting well and forget about coming to Iowa. “Don't be silly,” said Cheever, “of course I'm coming!” In fact he was terrified he'd begin drinking again and end up killing himself, and on his sixty-first birthday he went to see a Phelps psychiatrist named Frank Jewett, whom Cheever dubbed “The Boots” because of the man's preferred form of footwear. His main incitement to drinking, Cheever admitted as usual, was homosexual anxiety, and he went into some detail about his recent encounters with young men. Jewett—intrigued by the whole “Death in Venice plot,” as he put it, and perhaps a little doubtful as to whether the puckish Cheever was entirely serious—couldn't resist discussing the matter with his old med-school pal Ray Mutter, who was convinced that Cheever was toying with the man. Laughing heartily, he related the whole “homosexual” business to Susan, who was both amused and exasperated: how was her father ever going to get better if he didn't quit clowning and level with these people? “Come on, Daddy,” she said. “Why did you go and tell ‘The Boots’ that you were homosexual?” After a pause, her father laughed: “I guess I just don't like psychiatrists.”

  Home again after almost a month in the hospital, Cheever felt a happiness at being alive that was “indescribable”: “There is a sinister shrink in the wings who says that my euphoria is regressive,” he wrote Weaver, “that I am high because I'm forbidden to do what I don't like to do (emptying the garbage) and that if I don't take his advice I'll end up in the stews. I've told him to kiss off.” A month of sobriety had wrought a dramatic change: his bloated body seemed to deflate, his blue eyes stood out in his head again, and he treated his family with a sort of wan, remorseful courtesy. He was still a very sick man: his left ventricle remained “unruly,” and his heart did a “clog dance” whenever he tried climbing stairs. Still, in the absence of drinking, he longed to be more productive. Sitting in his wing chair or out on the porch, he sipped iced tea and wrote “on air” bits of Falconer he'd been kicking around for over a year: the protagonist's murder of his brother, the man's love affair with the convict “Joey” (a name he'd understandably change to “Jody” in due course). In the meantime Gottlieb (et al.) knew about his precarious health and what had led up to it, and seemed hesitant to give Cheever another high advance. Nor could Cheever, in good conscience, complain much, since he'd yet to write a single finished word of the novel in question: “A nightmare is that I will die suddenly and some editor—Bob [Gottlieb] perhaps—will find no trace of the book,” he wrote that June. “I ought to leave something that looks like a book. So my long vacation continues.” A few weeks later, Gottlieb came around with a hundred thousand dollars, and sometime in August Cheever finally managed
to write a few “inarticulate and clumsy” pages of Falconer.

  One problem was rust; another was that he'd begun drinking again. Doing so, he'd followed to the letter the classic pattern of the alcoholic who gets sober in response to some crisis, then thinks he's capable of drinking moderately and almost immediately reverts to his previous condition or worse. In Cheever's case it would get much, much worse, though it began with a trifle: “I drink perhaps a tablespoon of whisky,” he noted in mid-July “The effects are splendid, beyond anxiety, but I suppose I should confess this.” A page later, he wrote: “Alone, I drink a whisky after dinner. It tastes very good. It seems to do me no harm but I must be very careful about this.” Cheever would have found a reason to drink in any case, but since it was summer the most satisfying reason was readily at hand: his wife was going away to Treetops, and if that weren't callous enough, she was taking the whole family with her—all but Cheever, who felt very sorry for himself even though the decision to stay behind was, as ever, his. “I might state the facts,” he wrote, explaining to himself why he wanted to drink again, “that I am a very lonely man of sixty-one, malnourished, living alone with a cat, suffering from a heart condition and trying to write off a debt of one hundred thousand dollars before I die.” Still, he made a miniature stand of sorts. Home alone that first day, he poured his gin down the sink and tried to get some work done; then he lunched with friends and went for a swim at Mrs. Zagreb's. A drab day. His work went badly or not at all, and he found himself “less spontaneous” with friends. That same night, then, he consoled himself with two whiskeys (“I revel in these, wallow, smear, engorge myself”), and the next day he drove to the liquor store and replenished his gin.

  Federico returned from Treetops after a week or two, and soon discovered that his father was drinking again. Caught in the act, Cheever said that Mutter had allowed him to have two drinks a day*; Federico didn't buy it and demanded he stop. For a while Cheever drank furtively and somewhat moderately, and from time to time would even ask his son's permission; this being denied—emphatically—he'd sneak a drink anyway. Meanwhile he worked on the only real writing he accomplished that summer: a brief testimonial on the savory elegance of Suntory whisky, in return for which a Japanese PR man arrived one day with a case of the stuff. “I was nervous about it,” Federico recalled, “and I think in one of his moments of pique he told me he'd drunk some of it to hurt me.” Federico promptly poured the rest of it into the sink, then phoned his mother in a panic and begged her to come home right away. But of course it was too late—had always been too late, though Cheever promised once again to abstain. “The gin bottle, the gin bottle,” he wrote.

  This is painful to record. I go to the post office and stay away from the gin shop. “If you drink you'll kill yourself,” says my son. His eyes are filled with tears. “Listen,” say I. “If I thought it would benefit you I'd jump off a ten-story building.” He doesn't want that, and there isn't a ten-story building in the village. I drive up the hill to get the mail and make a detour to the gin store. I hide the bottle under the car seat. We swim, and I wonder how I will get the bottle from the car to the house. I read while brooding on this problem. When I think that my beloved son has gone upstairs, I hide the bottle by the side of the house and lace my iced tea.

  By the end of August, Federico and Mary had exhausted their arguments and Cheever was drinking openly again. They avoided him in disgust, while he in turn felt sorry for himself and affected to look forward to Iowa. As he wrote a friend, “I'm not at all sure what I'm getting into or getting out of but there seems to be a time for departure and this seems to be it.”

  * As an example of the latter, the collection's most recent story consisted of three trite, unrelated anecdotes that Cheever had dumped on Playboy under the title “Triad” (reprinted in The World of Apples and The Stories of John Cheever as “Three Stories”). The first sketch is narrated by a middle-aged man's stomach, and—except for the elegant prose—reads like a funny story swapped among Rotarians.

  * Along with the rave reviews for The World of Apples, that same week he was also nominated to become one of the elite fifty in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  *”The doctor tells me that I cannot drink for the rest of my life,” Cheever wrote that summer. “I have a cardiomyopathy and a drop of alcohol in my bloodstream would be dangerous. I can always go to another doctor.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  {1973}

  CHEEVER WOULD LATER INDULGE in a certain amount of gloating over what a great time he'd had in Iowa, but the first weeks were grim. He was installed in Room 436 of the nondescript Iowa House, where the rooms were precisely those of a smalltown Midwestern hotel—the stark gumwood furniture, the beige walls, the black and white TV bolted to the dresser. Cheever was so lonely he wrote letters to almost everybody he knew, including the Dirkses and Tom Glazer; he'd sit in taverns wistfully observing the tables full of lively undergraduates, none of whom seemed inclined to accept his company.

  Knowing hardly a soul, he spent those first days traipsing around town—pausing every so often to catch his breath and worry about his heart—en route to the movies: Last Tango in Paris was a lot of pretentious “rubbish,” he thought, so he crossed the street to watch a Western and presently Godspell (“a highly estimable piece of work”). Afterward he'd sometimes visit an Irish tailor over a Chinese restaurant to check the progress of a navy three-piece he'd ordered (his “best suit” for many years); then, as evening fell, he'd either take an Italian lesson or go to the odd social engagement—the latter a dreary ordeal for a shy man who was trying to curb his drinking. Ron Hansen, who'd signed up for Cheever's workshop, became acquainted with his teacher at the writer John Irving's house (where Hansen lived in the basement and babysat Irving's children). Cheever had come to dinner wearing his new bespoke suit with an Academy badge in the lapel, and Hansen politely asked what the badge signified. “He explained the American Academy of Arts and Letters to me,” Hansen recalled, “as if he were prepared to be patient about anything now that he'd accepted a visiting professorship.”

  Life improved once he actually began teaching, and no wonder: all the best graduate students had assigned themselves to Cheever's workshop, and if a missile had hit the class, at least three of the leading lights of that generation would have been eliminated—Hansen, T. (Tom) Coraghessan Boyle, and Allan Gurganus. Once he settled in, Cheever would find such a concentration of talent invigorating (“when we bring off a seminar it takes three men to get me off the ceiling”), but at first it was a lot more daunting than teaching convicts. “We were a bunch of ragtag hippies,” said Boyle, “and he had no experience with such people”—or so it seemed. Cheever, wearing his tidy new suit and badge, would look dismayed at the “critical brawls” that took place during a typical workshop session, and by way of imposing a level of civility, he'd bring his accent and elegant manners to the fore. Gurganus remembered that Cheever was initially “very nervous, and the more nervous he got the more hauteur he affected and the more gargly and Katharine Hepburn-y his talk became.” Gurganus, a worldly young man in his mid-twenties, was able to put his teacher somewhat at ease: while in the navy, he'd discovered a copy of The Brigadier and the Golf Widow aboard the USS Yorktown (“because of the military title someone thought it had some vital application to national security”), so he knew that Cheever was more than simply a realistic “suburban writer,” as the others rather dismissively perceived him. Also, Gurganus was good-looking and quite insouciantly gay—as Cheever noted, “a versatile and brilliant young man who … dispels any doubts I have about his sexual nature with a clear-eyed self-possessed presence.”

  Because Gurganus had an enlightened reverence for his teacher, he was willing to put forth his best effort in completing the menial “drills” Cheever saw fit to assign: “Write me a love letter in a burning building,” he'd say, or “Give me seven or eight disparate objects or incidents that are superficially alien and yet profoundly allied.�
� This was nothing less than the sort of thing Flaubert had taxed the young Maupassant with, but Iowa students found it annoying: they were working on their own novels and stories, and didn't like being treated as if they were rank amateurs. Gurganus, however, submitted homework that was good enough to publish: “Seven Details the Major Critic of the Show Felt to Be Overexplicit” would later appear in The Atlantic Monthly, as would another story about an incestuous brother and sister seeking Aztec funeral urns in a burning building. As for Cheever, his constrained manner soon dissolved under the force of his enthusiasm. “Marvelous! Marvelous!“ he'd gush. “Oh gosh that's invigorating …” Nor was it simply a matter of soigné former sailors. “You're wonderful,“ he told the shaggy Tom Boyle. “We're equals!”

  It was different when he didn't like a story. Gurganus later worked with Stanley Elkin—a “genius teacher” who provided a study in contrast: “[Elkin] was like an architect looking at a building and telling you exactly where the stresses were,” said Gurganus. “John would either say yes or no. Either it would do or it wouldn't do. He said yes to me more often than he said no, but it was frustrating when he said no, because it was hard to get him to tell you what could be changed.” The most disheartening part was that he tended to be right, though it often required a lot of painful labor in the dark to discover why this should be so. Gurganus admitted that his own no stories were, in fact, buried at last in files somewhere (“with all the Christian rites and honors”), and even Cheever's formidable contemporary Hortense Calisher conceded the “ruthless” accuracy of his literary judgments: “Come now, Hortense, that's a fudge,” he'd say when she'd protest that she was still reading a book and hence uncertain as to its merit. “You can read a page and tell if it's alive or dead.” In workshop, Cheever would express rejection with a vaguely grim poker-face, perhaps a slight shrug, which was tantamount to a loud and insulting harangue. And if a student made the mistake of pressing him as to why a story didn't work, or (worse) how it might be improved, Cheever would respond with a sort of pensive sarcasm: “If that character is supposed to be gay” he might say, feigning careful deliberation, “maybe you could show as much by having him lick his fingers and wipe his eyebrows …” As Hansen explained, “He meant to suggest that the story was such a mess that even a detail like that wouldn't help.”