by Blake Bailey
In 1974, he was happy to be writing anything at all, given that he was suffering from fainting spells and washing down his digitalis and Seconal with larger and larger doses of liquor (“a half-pint a day,” he informed Dr. Mutter). Marooned in Ossining, fed up with the vagaries of Donald Lang and the dullness of the Friday Club, Cheever looked forward to regular visits from a handsome young scholar named Dennis Coates, who was writing about Cheever's novels for his dissertation at Duke. The two had met the previous summer, while Cheever was still convalescing from heart failure. Captain Coates was on his way to West Point, where he'd taken a job as an English instructor while continuing to work on his dissertation; since Ossining was only a short drive down the river, he visited his subject every month or so to interview him, then kept visiting because he'd come to regard Cheever as a friend and vice versa.
One day in April, Cheever came downstairs and announced that he'd just finished a story; would Denny like to hear it? The young man was more than honored: it felt “like a gift” being the first person to hear a story by John Cheever. The two sat at the dining-room table, where Cheever covered Coates's hand with his own and began to read “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear.” Coates thought the story was wonderful (distracted, perhaps, by the beauty of its prose), and made no connection between his covered hand and the masculine brand of homosexuality evoked in one of the vignettes. Afterward, though it was rather chilly outside, Cheever proposed they take a walk in the woods, and at one point asked the young man to hold him. Coates was happy to give his frail companion a warming embrace, but became flustered when Cheever tried to kiss him: he was fond of John, and certainly wanted to be friends, but not like that! Cheever affected to be almost as innocent as Coates: “To me it's all love,” he said, and the two lay together (chastely) to get out of the wind and go on chatting about things.
When Coates returned in early June, it was warm enough to go swimming, so Cheever suggested they make a round of his neighbors’ pools. He swam naked and urged his friend to do likewise, but Coates went on wearing a pair of baggy, borrowed trunks. As they sat on the edge of a pool, Coates sadly remarked that Cheever seemed “the most unloved man [he'd] ever known”: “I feel like I'm watching a tragedy, and this is the second act.” The naked man indignantly denied it: “I am one of the most loved men on earth!” he protested, elaborating at length about how he'd vied with Sinatra for the heart of Hope Lange, and so forth. “Your crack about my being unloved still rankles,” he wrote Coates. “I ask everybody—everybody—if they love me and they all say yes. The girl from Iowa writes daily to say I'm beautiful. … In any case if I am unloved I shouldn't be forsaken and please come over. The swimming's great.”
In fact, Cheever felt very forsaken and didn't hesitate to say so, at least to his family: he was a dying man, for all they cared! When Cheever wasn't recuperating in bed, he staggered about the house with a drink in his hand, wondering what he'd done to deserve such indifference. One day he suffered a series of painful spasms in his chest, and rather than call his available daughter (“I am cranky with Susie”), he tried instead to reach Coates at West Point, and subsequently implied to his psychiatrist, Jewett, that he drank (and was therefore dying) because of his sad situation at home. Jewett replied that Cheever invented his problems to justify his drinking, and insisted the patient check himself into a dry-out clinic—whereupon Cheever ended their relationship: “The memory of strait jackets and cruelty is still vivid.”
Federico resumed his role as caretaker when he returned that summer from Andover, finding his father both craftier and nastier. Cheever stashed bottles all over the property and sometimes slipped away to get drunk in peace. Calling around to their neighbors one day, Federico located his father at Mrs. Zagreb's, and, waiting on the phone, he glanced down and spotted a half-pint of gin in one of Cheever's boots. Ever more vigilant, he began accompanying his father to parties, though Cheever was less amenable to “signals” than he'd been with Elaine in Iowa. “Oddly,” said Federico, “one of my memories of that summer was to think that, because of everything that had happened, I would have lines on my face when I returned to school and that would bring me more respect.” But then the very fact that he now had a refuge of sorts, another life to return to, made him less apt to panic over his father's heedless self-destruction; because of the boy's relative detachment, Cheever tended to accuse him, too, of being unfeeling. For Federico it was more like exhaustion: “I remember Susie and I taking a walk,” he remarked, “and her saying, ‘He's dying.’ I felt no surprise.”
Susan had also begun to distance herself, with arguably better reason. That spring her marriage broke up, and she was chagrined to find her father going out of his way to console her ex-husband, who also found it “kind of appalling.” One day the two men sat commiserating in a gas line, passing a flask, and Cheever freely admitted that he'd always wanted a blond “Linda Boyer type” for a daughter. He even urged Rob not to pay alimony, since the man was already burdened with two children from a previous marriage. As for the married man Susan had “[run] off” with—Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle—Cheever referred to him as a “wretched buffoon,” citing the time he'd squashed a banana into Federico's typewriter. For her part, Susan seemed to respond to her father's latest rejection by working harder than ever to step out of his shadow. While at the Tarrytown Daily News, she won an Associated Press writing award (“People stop me on the street and ask if I'm really her father,” said Cheever), and in 1974 she was hired as religion editor at Newsweek. Toward her father she was alternately solicitous and bullying. Particularly at the dinner table—“the shark tank”—she let him know in quite pointed terms what she thought of his manipulative self-pity, and Cheever seemed at a loss to respond: “He would look hangdog, as if he deserved it,” one guest remembered.
The more wretched he became, though, the more incessantly he talked about his young “mistress” Elaine. Here, after all, was a person who loved him as he deserved to be loved. More than once his son called him a “shit” and told him to shut up already (“It's one thing to have affairs,” said Federico, “another to trot them out exclusively to cause pain”), which only seemed to validate Cheever in his roguish-ness. When Mary announced that she was going to Treetops, as always, for a few weeks in August, he reached for his usual cudgel: Elaine would come stay with him, he said, and he wouldn't even require Iole on the premises. Mary seemed all in favor of the idea, and even phoned Elaine in Maine: John was rather ill, she explained, and hated to be left alone; would Elaine be willing to come and take care of him for a few weeks? Not only did Elaine decline, she declined vehemently: “Why don't you divorce him?” she said. “How can you stand him?” Perhaps Mary chose not to relate the girl's exact response to her ailing husband, who at any rate claimed to have been swayed by the better angels of his nature: “[Elaine] is not here,” he reported to Coates. “In a fleeting moment of common sense I realized that this is Mary's house and that [Elaine] is unwelcome. [Elaine] is sulking in Maine.”
In August, then, Federico was again left alone to care for Cheever, who was finding it harder and harder to get out of bed and whose ankles had swollen ominously. Finally the boy burst into tears and demanded his father go to the hospital and dry out, or else he was leaving for good. When Cheever kept insisting he was fine, his son got in the car and drove away, while Iole berated her employer with a lot of histrionic Italian; by the time Federico had driven around the block, Cheever was willing to go. According to his admission report at Phelps, he informed the doctors that his drinking had been “minimal” in Iowa—but alas: “On return home to a tense emotional atmosphere, he again began consuming larger quantities of alcohol until the present time his intake is approximately that before he originally became ill.” Treated with vitamins and Valium, Cheever was able to avoid another bout of the DTs and by the fifth day he appeared to be successfully withdrawn. Dr. Mutter gave him the usual stern lecture, and Cheever returned home and resumed drinking within a day o
r two.
“If I just leave you awful people,” he said to his disgusted family, “everything will be fine.” At the same time, he seemed to be hoping they'd come to their senses and beg him to stay. “He was an invalid,” said Federico. “The notion that he was going to leave his oppressive wife and be happy was obviously absurd. He was no more capable of doing his own laundry than …” He paused. “I won't make the dangerous and inflammatory similes. We let him go. Fatigue was a big item.”
* For Orphanos, Cheever simply removed the section that had already appeared in Falconer: “[I]n my considered opinion,” he wrote the publisher, “the story is improved by this deletion.” Certainly it wasn't harmed by it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
{1974}
BY WAY OF DECLARING his independence, one of the first things Cheever did in Boston was order stationery: “John Cheever / 71 Bay State Road / Boston, Massachusetts 02215.” This enabled him to write despondent letters about how much he despised his new lodgings, and never mind the “sinister” part of town where he found himself, Kenmore Square (“part student, part slum”), whose most prominent feature was a school for embalming, or so he rarely failed to point out. At his (peremptory and belated) request, an apartment had been found for him in a handsome bow-front brownstone on a leafy street near campus, though it was hardly ideal for a lonely alcoholic with a bad heart: not only was it four flights up, but the interior was bleak and Cheever was disinclined to personalize it. “[There] is no point in listing the contents of these two rooms,” he wrote shortly after his arrival. “It is much too decorous and efficient although there is dirty clothing on all the chairs.” His main attitude was one of bewilderment: he'd worked hard all his life—attained the pinnacle of his profession!—only to be banished by his family to two furnished rooms in Boston, where he expected to “end up penniless and naked” like his poor grandfather Aaron, what with the predations of the Plymouth Rock Laundry.
He found some consolation in long walks beneath the shady elms of Commonwealth Avenue: “I start with the Lief Ericson [sic] monument and go on to the president of the Argentine who is massive. He is followed by [William Lloyd] Garrison (with whom my great uncle was tarred and feathered).* … Then we have George Washington and the Ritz Bar. I return here by the river and clock it at about six miles.” But even these constitutionals were tainted by memories of happier days—those jolly walks along the Iowa River with Allan, swapping jokes and feeding the buffaloes. “He hasn't sent me a thing,” Cheever remarked that first lugubrious week, gazing teary-eyed at the Charles. In the absence of some suitable companion, he was thrown back all the more on memories of his miserable youth, when he'd considered himself “a patsy, a Joey, basically a second rate clown.” The whole abortive return to Boston, in fact, called to mind “the last pages in Proust”: he kept running into people from the past—or their ghosts—who knew him as the wayward son of a gift-shop proprietress, rather than a world-renowned author with a supposedly patrician pedigree.
As for his relations with the university, they began with delinquencies on both sides and went downhill from there. As a last-minute replacement for Jean Stafford (who was allegedly drinking even more than Cheever), the relatively obscure Ivan Gold had been hired to teach the other workshop section; consequently most students had requested Cheever, whose classes were swamped. He repeatedly asked that the situation be remedied, but found the administration “quite mysterious” at best: the head of the English department wasn't returning his calls (he finally met the man by accident, standing at an adjoining urinal), and George Starbuck of the writing program seemed alarmed at the very sight of him. “I did not rise to the occasion of John's troubles,” Starbuck later admitted, “did not effectively love or help him, floundered stupidly between catering to him … [and] pursuing some coherent plan of stern-but-supportive intervention.” And yet his wariness was at least somewhat understandable, since Cheever—quite apart from his disastrous alcoholism—had given signs of being very high-maintenance indeed. First he'd demanded that Starbuck find him suitable lodgings, then he let it be known that Iowa had “provided” him with a graduate student who served as a kind of secretary-cum-mistress-cum-nurse, and he expected BU to do the same. As Starbuck recalled, “There was (carefully) plenty of twinkle in his voice … as he urged this. Pixie mischief. But he did urge it, and tell me he needed just that to keep him on an even keel.” Starbuck, however, balked at “playing procurer” even for so distinguished a colleague, whose invidious comparisons between Iowa and Boston usually ended with “ … and every night [in Iowa] there was someone to suck my cock!”
For the first month or two, Cheever was able to function as a teacher. Precisely because he drank before classes (vodka mostly, since it was relatively odorless), he remained fairly alert and often held forth in an engaging way. His remarks tended to be incisive, and sometimes led to worthwhile tangents about his own writing and what seemed to work for him. He found his students “responsive and contentious”—if not especially talented—and made a point of learning their names quickly and finding out what sort of books they liked (Gravity's Rainbow was the rage, and Cheever also professed to like it—or rather he liked it better than Vonnegut's work, which was almost always the other favorite). He assigned “drills” as ever, though these were received with even less enthusiasm than at Iowa. As an exercise in “describing the indescribable,” one of his students—a semi-famous novelist's son, who fancied himself experimental—read an endless list of synonyms for “Death” from Roget's Thesaurus. A long silence followed. “It's a found object,” the young man explained. Cheever threw his head back and studied the ceiling. “From now on,” he said at length (“sound[ing] like Alfred Hitchcock after a pint of gin,” one student observed), “all found objects shall be designated ‘FOs.’ “
Not surprisingly, Cheever couldn't be bothered to read his students’ work outside of class, seeming to think it was more than sufficient that he had to listen to it. Asked about a large manuscript on his coffee table—a novel, as it happened, by the semi-famous novelist's son—Cheever closed his eyes and shook his head; when, however, he returned the manuscript (exactly one week after the epigone had given it to him), he declared it “perfect”: “Submit it to a New York publisher and they'll publish it right away!” (“I never got it published,” the author reported thirty years later.) All graduate students, in fact, were required to get two professors to read and sign off on their thesis work, and whenever they managed to run Cheever to ground and ask for his signature, he was always happy to give it. “Oh yes very good,” he'd mutter, when they asked if he liked the work in question.
Whatever remained of Cheever's willpower was entirely reserved for showing up; outside the classroom, he barely functioned at all. His most constant companion (at least that first semester) was a graduate student named Laurens Schwartz, who'd been one of Red Warren's protégés at Yale; perhaps because of this connection (and/or the manuscript he purported to have read), Cheever had recommended the young man for a full scholarship at BU. Schwartz endeavored to return the favor. Since Cheever “had a tendency to walk out of his apartment nude,” Schwartz would meet him several mornings a week to make sure he was properly dressed. Dirty clothes were strewn about the rooms; the butcher-block table in the kitchen was covered with empty bottles and rotting fruit (brought by Mary). Trembling from head to toe, unable to speak, Cheever would walk with Schwartz to a seedy hotel bar on the way to campus, where a rock-faced waitress in a miniskirt would wordlessly bring her only customer a double vodka on the rocks. As Schwartz recalled, “Cheever was like one of those toy birds who peck at a water glass: he'd lower his head, sip, come up, and repeat. Maybe halfway through, he'd finally be able to pick up the glass.” He'd also tentatively attempt speech, and after a few garbled phrases would begin to make some kind of sense, whereupon he'd become tearful, as if his own words were unbearable to hear. His life was such a mess: he had no clean clothes, the proprietor of the Plymouth Rock L
aundry was a bandit, and for the last seventeen days he'd subsisted entirely on oranges and hamburgers. On it went. Meanwhile he tried to light a cigarette, the matches falling one after another from twitching fingers; Schwartz, snatching the embers out of Cheever's lap, once counted thirty matches to light a single cigarette. Over and over Schwartz implored the decrepit man to see a doctor, but Cheever seemed more interested in maundering about his woes than in doing much about them. “It was like taking care of a child,” said Schwartz, echoing his various predecessors.
Word traveled fast that Cheever was an all-but-hopeless drunk. The eminent Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray—creator of the Thematic Apperception Test, as well as a notable Melville enthusiast—had thrown a welcoming party for Cheever, a mistake neither he nor any of his guests was likely to repeat. On arrival, Cheever shoved an armchair into the middle of the living room, where he drooped slack-jawed for the rest of the evening, cigarettes turning to ash in his fingers and crumbling to the carpet. Michael Janeway had found Cheever's condition “heartbreaking.” As a boy he'd received a kindly, encouraging letter from Cheever, who was friends with his mother, Elizabeth. Now a thirty-four-year-old editor at The Atlantic Monthly, Janeway had arranged to meet Cheever at the Ritz Grill with the magazine's editor in chief, Robert Manning, another of Cheever's old acquaintances. Any hope of soliciting a story dissipated over the course of lunch, as their guest emptied multiple mini-carafes of martinis amid a sodden monologue on his ruined marriage and the like. As Janeway recalled, “The message was (his and mine), ‘You don't want to get too close.’ “ Cheever's only putative confidant among peers was the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, a colleague at BU whom he often met for Wednesday lunches at Locke-Ober. “We were intimate but not close,” Brinnin remarked after Cheever's death, perhaps alluding to the evanescent nature of their rapport under the circumstances. “Should I not remember you when next we meet,” Cheever apologetically wrote the poet in 1978, “it will only be an aspect of my clumsiness and will not at all mean that I have forgotten your kindness to me during that trying winter in Boston.”