Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Whether or not Cheever liked a student's work also seemed to depend on whether he found the person attractive in the comprehensive sense intended by his mother-in-law, Polly, or the “metaphysical” sense, as Gurganus would have it: “Just as you either got a story the first time or you didn't, people were either attractive or unattractive.” Cheever ran the workshop like a “very nice cocktail party,” and he liked people to amuse him. One woman, however, was definitely unamusing to Cheever. She was fortyish, had two children, and was overweight and dowdy and wore funny glasses. Once, when Cheever was reading a story to the class, she apologetically remembered that she had to go pick up her children at school. Cheever lowered his book and gave her a hard stare. “I am not going to stop reading this story for you.” There were many such episodes, one of which sparked a remark in Cheever's journal: “I lash out at a middle-aged woman with harlequin glasses who has left her family to pursue her literary career. She has little if any talent but my distemper is probably personal.” That Cheever would find such a woman distasteful requires no elaboration. However, classmates remember her as really quite likable and talented; what's more (and this was well known), she'd been abandoned by her husband, not vice versa. “John couldn't find one thing to praise in her work,” Gurganus recalled. “He smelled her bad luck and her poverty and her ordinariness, and maybe he felt it was wrong to encourage her if he didn't think she had a future.”

  Mostly, though, Cheever was the soul of kindness and tact, and was even prepared to forgive his students’ dislike or (more often) total ignorance of his own work. “I'm terribly out of mode,” he said again and again. “Nobody reads me anymore.” The young Tom Boyle agreed: like so many of his peers, he worshipped at the feet of “experimental” writers such as Barthelme and Barth, and particularly liked to invoke the latter's Sot-Weed Factor. Finally—diffidently—Cheever allowed that he didn't much care for Barth, and even had the temerity to suggest that he himself was experimental. “All writing is ‘experimental,’ Tom,” he said. “Don't get caught up in fads.” Boyle inwardly scoffed and continued to regard Cheever as “an old stick in the mud”—until he finally got around to rereading Cheever's work with care. To this day he's still reading it, though it's been a long time since he's read any Barthelme or Barth. “Anyone can write a Barthelme story,” said Boyle. “No one can write a Cheever story.”

  It was all the same to Cheever—most of the time. “Look in my closet,” he'd say (wearing his bespoke suit). “Two shirts and two pairs of wash pants.” Then he'd shake his head with a sad little chuckle. As for all the patronizing young geniuses at Iowa, well, let them have their fun. “Ah yes, I loved your book,” he told the poet Michael Ryan, who'd recently won a prize. As Ryan wrote many years later in “Meeting Cheever”:

  And you, inconsolable bell-bottomed cliché of wounded-by-the-world angry young poet who became me as strangely as years become today, replied, “The book's not published yet.”

  And so the poem ends:

  … Where was the future with its bloody claws? Brilliant John Cheever is a handful of ash. I would be finished with what I was.

  • • •

  CHEEVER SOON GAVE UP his occasional sobriety. Jack Leggett liked to tell of the time he'd been called to the phone at a party where Cheever had already drunk “twelve or thirteen martinis;” the caller proved to be none other than Cheever's doctor: “Whatever you do,” the man said, “don't let him drink. He could drop dead at any moment!” After less than a month on campus, Cheever was visited by his old Signal Corps buddy John Weaver, who was stopping in Iowa on his way home from a research trip. Weaver was under the impression that his ailing friend had gotten sober at last, but the morning after his arrival Cheever insisted they go to a bar, and when Weaver left to catch his plane a few hours later, Cheever was “stoned”: “I left Iowa never expecting to see him again,” Weaver remembered.

  Cheever knew he was killing himself, but he claimed to be too depressed not to drink. Over and over, to whosoever would listen, he spoke of how “inadequate” he felt as a husband and father, laying the blame on himself with mawkish insistence, as if it might ease the shame. (Rather like the tippler in The Little Prince, he drank because he was ashamed, and was ashamed because he drank.) On the other hand, he didn't really want to die either. Once, overcome by dizziness, he staggered to the grassy bank of the Iowa River and sat down. It was a crystalline autumn day, and he watched the students walk by as through an impenetrable pane of glass. The “tangible world” was receding, he couldn't even cry out, and this “vision of youth”—so coveted by the helpless observer—would be the last thing he'd ever see. “If I die,” he told Gurganus, “I've given your name to the hotel, and I have instructed them to call you any hour of the day or night, and as soon as you get the call, I want you to come and get these journals out of here, because I'm afraid they'll fall into the wrong hands.” He showed Gurganus the twenty or so loose-leaf notebooks under his desk, and the young man (amid token protest: “Oh, don't be ridiculous, John”) promised to do exactly as told.

  Cheever's despair was belied somewhat by all the fun he seemed to be having. “I shout myself hoarse at football games,” he wrote Spear, “take young women to concerts, dance the Virginia Reel, play football, lecture on the problems of modern fiction and generally splatter myself over this part of the mid-western landscape.” As one of the most famous writers ever to grace the faculty, Cheever was literally welcomed with open arms wherever he went. One day a stranger embraced him in the elevator, and when Cheever inquired as to whom he owed the pleasure of such a charming salutation, the man introduced himself as the president of the university, Willard “Sandy” Boyd. Cheever became a regular guest in the man's home, where he knew he was dealing with quality because, after all, there was Messiaen on the piano's music stand! When it came to splattering himself around the landscape, though, Cheever preferred the company of young people. Ron Hansen was dating one of the few women in the workshop, Sarah Irwin, whom Cheever found “friendly as a cocker spaniel” and took to a number of football games. Passing a thermos of Scotch and huddling under a lap rug, the two would cheer the hapless Hawkeyes before returning to Iowa House for long, drunken soul-chats. “I'm displaced and lonely,“ Cheever would say (“drawl[ing] out the word with a terribly hollow oh sound—lohnely,” Irwin recalled), telling as ever the saga of his marriage—how there's “always a lover and a beloved” and his wife was decidedly the latter. (“I talk with M[ary] on the phone and these conversations are always poor,” he wrote around that time. “I make the sign of the cross and can barely keep from hanging up.”) Worried that Irwin's boyfriend would get the wrong idea, Cheever proposed they pay him a visit one Saturday afternoon, and the three sat around the floor of his basement apartment drinking wine and popping cashews. The dapper, mannerly Cheever kept startling the couple with the odd bombshell: “I was at Yaddo last month,” he remarked in passing, “and there was this sculptor who kept following me around, so finally I just let him blow me and that was the end of it.” While Hansen and Irwin listened with widening eyes, Cheever added, “Fellatio is the nicest thing one human being can do for another.”

  Hansen and Irwin also accompanied their teacher to a bluegrass festival, where he managed to disconcert them for a different reason. Joining a touch-football game, Cheever frisked about, howling with laughter and gasping for air, while his minders wondered if they should do something before it was too late. Fortunately, Cheever noticed that (as Irwin put it) “the other players were moving around him like something fragile as an egg, and he did not wish to spoil the game.” Next he jumped on a picnic table and began dancing a jig, then scampered up the hill to join a Virginia reel. As he noted in his journal, “I romped into this with such enthusiasm that I damned near had a heart attack, and ended up (happily) sitting on a pile of horse buns.” Even in quieter circumstances, Cheever hardly behaved like an old man nearing the end of his journey. The night after the festival, Irwin stopped by his room for a d
rink—perhaps to make sure he was still breathing—and at one point Cheever tenderly kissed her foot and placed it against his chest. Things began to go further (“I had a great deal of admiration and affection for John,” said Irwin—”that plus the Scotch”), but both had qualms about Hansen and decided to keep things on a platonic basis.

  Cheever's most constant female companion, however, was not Irwin. One day he was reading beside the river when a young woman approached: “Good afternoon, Mr. Cheever,” she said, launching into a spiel about how she'd read everything he'd ever written and wanted so badly to be in his class, but she was only a first-year and they wouldn't let her in. (“I sit on the river banks with [Elaine],* an intelligent young woman with a slight gauntness in the face.”) Cheever said he'd take care of it, and got her into his literature class. Meanwhile he began asking her to have drinks and dinner with him. “People were falling all over themselves to have ten minutes with him,” she remembered, “and he wanted to be with me.” Elaine was able to appreciate, vividly, that she was in the presence of greatness, and Cheever did his best to oblige her. Eating a hamburger at their usual hangout, The Deadwood, he began reciting one of his stories from memory; the girl listened, spellbound, and afterward checked the actual text in her room and realized that he'd “told [her] the story literally word for word.”†

  Elaine repaid the compliment of Cheever's regard by making herself indispensable. Whatever else she was, she was foremost his keeper. “We set up certain signals,” she said, “like, if we went to someone's house or whatever and I saw that he was getting sloppy, I'd give him the signal that we had to leave, and we'd leave. He'd say, ‘Oh, we have to go. Miss Moody* has another engagement.’ “ Leggett, for one, attested to this peculiar dynamic: in public, at least, Elaine appeared to have the upper hand, almost as if she were “exercising marital rights.” Naturally people began to talk, and perhaps to put the girl at ease, or simply because he wished to unburden himself, Cheever announced one day that he had something very important to tell her. “He was really a wreck,” said Elaine. “I think he thought I was going to reject him or have a fit. He told me he was gay.” As she remembered it, Cheever made a point of emphasizing gay as opposed to bisexual, though Cheever's journal suggests otherwise: “I go back with [Elaine] to her dormitory. My sexual iridescence [Cheever's term for a sort of ravenous versatility] is spread out with more breadth than ever before. … Look, look at grandfather. Leaving a girl's room in a dormitory at half past three in the morning.” Not that Cheever minded being seen in that kind of compromising situation; on the contrary, he made a point of telling his drinking companions at Iowa—and later his family—all about his sexual exploits with the young woman. Then and later, she vehemently denied having sex with Cheever, though it wasn't something she wanted to confront him about. In private, he was very much the master and she the disciple.

  It was Gurganus who brought out the boyish swain in Cheever. “You look fantastic!” Cheever would gush when the two met for Sunday strolls along the river. “What a handsome man you are!” In his journal Cheever deplored how this Eagle Scout and Vietnam veteran would “swing his hips” when he walked. As ever, the most admired male evoked the strongest homophobia. But otherwise he found the young man's openness “highly desirable” and relished his company. The two could talk as equals: Gurganus would give his “generational opinion” of Cheever's contemporaries (most urgently Bellow and Updike, the only rivals Cheever cared to acknowledge), and delighted the older man by admiring many of the same books as he.† On one end of their walk they'd feed grass to the buffaloes at the zoo, until finally they came full-circle to Iowa House, where Cheever would try coaxing his protégé upstairs for some Scotch and whatnot. However, if there wasn't any concrete business to accomplish—a manuscript to discuss; a dying man's last request—Gurganus would usually decline. (“We part the student and the teacher,” Cheever noted a little ruefully.) Which is not to say Gurganus failed to reciprocate Cheever's delight in his company. “[John] was so entertaining, he was so wonderful, so alive to the moment,” said Gurganus. One of his fondest memories was sitting with Cheever in the River Room restaurant at the Iowa House, the two telling each other stories about their fellow diners—a game at which Cheever seemed eager to be bested. Gurganus would indicate, say, a plump middle-aged couple eating with their Down-syndrome daughter, and speculate as follows: “His third marriage, her first, the daughter a ‘love-child’ of his youth (first cousin, out of wedlock) who had become an unconscious millstone for him, ruining with her hapless demands marriage after marriage, job after job, since he still refused to have her institutionalized. Today was the day wife number three had found a home for poor Margerie and this was to be her last veal cutlet as a free girl …” Cheever would bunch up in his chair, ecstatically tickled, an ideal audience. “Gosh, but we had fun,” Gurganus recalled. “Sex alone would have spoiled it.”

  Even at the best of times, though, Cheever's ambivalence about homosexuality was never entirely forgotten. He often doted quite openly on Gurganus, but if the student responded with some sort of well-meaning tenderness, Cheever would fret over what he perceived to be the young man's sudden effeminacy, not to say his shameless teasing: “[Allan] flirts with me,” he wrote. “The more he flirts, the more he seems like a woman. He shifts his shoulders … and gives me long, bone-making gazes, but we stay within four feet of each other.” It galled Cheever, and would go on galling him to the end: Gurganus could play sandlot football; he was so perfect in many ways—witty, well read, gifted—if only he weren't so homosexual. And, given that he let himself be known as gay, the least he could do—or so Cheever manifestly believed—was go to bed with him! Their relationship was summed up nicely by an encounter (of sorts) that Halloween. Gurganus was at a Gay Liberation costume party in the basement of the Unitarian church; dressed as a German sailor, he was dancing with another costumed youth when he looked up and saw Cheever gazing down at him from the basement window. Years later, Gurganus couldn't help vacillating a little in evoking that look on Cheever's face: on the one hand, he seemed a wistful von Aschenbach, or was it a baneful Peter Quint, or for that matter “some Victorian urchin looking into a bakery through a cloud made with his own breath”? Doubtless it was something of all three.

  ONE OF CHEEVER'S MORE INNOCENT overnight guests was the thirty-five-year-old Raymond Carver, who lived on a different floor of the Iowa House but couldn't be bothered to stagger back to the elevator. The two were a very odd pair indeed: Carver was a burly working-class fellow with frazzled hair and sideburns—”a truck-driver or master-sergeant type,” as Leggett put it. They'd become acquainted when Carver sought Cheever's help in tying his necktie prior to a faculty party. What they had in common was a love of literature and drink. Carver had yet to publish his first book of fiction, and was thrilled to meet Cheever and just sit there listening to him (“I'd never heard anyone use the language like that”). He made himself useful by giving Cheever lifts to the liquor store, preferably the moment it opened at ten o'clock. As Carver remembered of one such run, “[T]he clerk was just unlocking the front door. … John got out of the car before I could get it properly parked. By the time I got inside he was already at the checkout stand with a half gallon of Scotch.”*

  Cheever had a more temperate friendship with the young John Irving, who, like Carver, was still laboring in relative obscurity at the time (he'd published two novels to little acclaim). He and Cheever had a weekly ritual of watching Monday Night Football and eating homemade pasta, and once they escorted the writer J. P. Donleavy to his reading. (Cheever wrote of The Ginger Man in 1959: “[It] amuses me and has, real or false, the dingdong litany of the Welsh and the Irish.”) Irving had met Donleavy and his wife at the airport, and was startled by the man's absolute lack of civility: Donleavy let him know that he never read living writers, and wondered aloud if they were in Kansas; later he told Irving's students that any writer who lowered himself to teaching “wasn't capable of teaching them an
ything.” When Irving introduced Cheever, the Irishman ignored them both and resumed chatting with his wife about her headache; Cheever tried a few conversational sallies, then said, “Do you know, Mr. Donleavy, that no major writer of fiction was ever a shit to another writer, except Hemingway—and he was crazy?” Donleavy looked blank (Who is this bloke?), and nothing further was said. “Surely you're not going in to see that man read?” Cheever called to Ron Hansen, as the latter queued up on the sidewalk with an SRO crowd. For his part, Cheever repaired to a bar, but later showed up at a party in Donleavy's honor. Disgusted to a find the man surrounded by acolytes, Cheever beckoned Hansen and Irwin into another room: “Let's get people to come to our party,” he said, and began booming “Ho ho ho!” as provocatively as possible.