Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  As for Updike, he too was estranged from a wife named Mary, and living in Back Bay about a mile from Cheever. The similarities ended there. They'd met by accident in September, outside Brooks Brothers, where Cheever had invited Updike to join him while he blithely purchased two pairs of tasseled loafers, though the tassels gave him very slight pause. (He subsequently told Schwartz that he'd “trained” Updike never to inquire about prices when shopping for clothes.) That done, the two adjourned to the Kon-Tiki bar at the Park Plaza, where Cheever instructed the waiter with great urgency to bring him doubles (“as if a drink that was merely single might in its weakness poison him”). Saying goodbye on Commonwealth, Updike paused to watch his “wobbly” colleague walking away under the elms: “I felt badly,” he remembered, “because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.”* Cheever likewise noted the “conspicuous ego clash” between the two, and yet remained galled as ever by Updike's failure to cultivate warmer relations. “Updike never calls me,” he complained. “We bump into each other and it's like old times, but he never calls me!” Updike did, in fact, call him—but at measured intervals. There was that night at Symphony Hall when Updike had helped the naked Cheever get into his clothes, and another time when he took him to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an old Garbo film, which proved to be sold out; after dining instead at the Café Budapest, Updike was startled when Cheever bolted out of the car in Roxbury to buy cigarettes “at a dark and heavily grated corner emporium.”

  Later, reading Falconer, Updike seemed to recognize the novel's first sentences as the very ones he'd spotted on a sheet of paper stuck in Cheever's typewriter—always the same dusty sheet, unaltered. Whether Cheever made any further progress in Boston is unlikely* A visitor from nearby Bradford College, James Valhouli, had read parts of Cheever's Boston journal (later destroyed) and found them “incoherent,” while Laurens Schwartz observed that Cheever could hardly type: “He used his forefingers, punching out each letter at one-second intervals. … He wrote two lines and suddenly faded out.” The reason he made that one attempt in Schwartz's presence—drunk, late at night—was that he intended to rewrite one of the young man's stories (“I'm going to get it published for you”), having mentioned that he'd rewritten “Minor Heroism” and even parts of Updike. This, of course, was the pathetic braggadocio of a man who hadn't done a first-rate piece of work (as he saw it) since Bullet Park six years before, and had begun to suspect his career and perhaps his life were over. When Candida Donadio sent him a copy of the acclaimed new novel by Joseph Heller (another of her clients), Something Happened, Cheever read a few pages and threw it out the window. Because he liked it.

  EVEN CHEEVER HAD TO CONCEDE a “Vesuvian maternalism” on Mary's part while he languished in Boston. She brought him groceries almost every weekend, and would stay the night to tidy up and take care of his immediate needs. One day Schwartz was holding down the fort while Cheever was out buying vodka, when Mary suddenly swept into the apartment with a large bag of apples she'd brought from New Hampshire. Identifying herself to Schwartz, she proceeded to collect the empty bottles from the kitchen table and replace them with apples (even though a number of old apples and oranges were still there, gathering mold). “That's good,” said Schwartz, casting about for some pleasantry. “I try!” she said, and walked out the door.

  Though it was only a short bus ride from Andover, Federico visited his father in Boston perhaps a total of two or three times. It was true Cheever made an effort to pull himself together (“He didn't answer the door naked,” Federico noted; “I should consider myself relatively fortunate”), but the whole picture was “just too depressing”: his apartment was always a shambles (Mary's efforts withal), and in the midst of what was obviously an excruciating bout of semi-sobriety for his son's benefit, Cheever was not only dour but a little senile, or so it seemed. They'd eat at a nearby Greek place (Aegean Fare) where Cheever took most of his meals, and would talk about anything but “the gorilla sitting on the table,” as Federico put it; that the boy no longer bothered to scold his father for drinking was a measure of how hopeless things had become. As for Ben and Susan, they couldn't bring themselves to visit at all, and the disenchantment was mutual. Cheever often remarked that his older son didn't have any push: he was a henpecked husband who seemed content to waste his life in a worthless job, sponging off his parents. Which was mild compared with what he had to say about Susan, whose affair with Hinckle never ceased to rankle: “She's going to marry a chap who just wrote a book about lemons,”* he'd say, adding that he didn't think much of the book or the chap, and going on from there. One day his old friend Newhouse phoned Ben at the Rockland Journal News: he'd just visited his son at Harvard, he said, and at Mary's behest had delivered some groceries to Bay State Road, where he'd found Cheever “sodden drunk”—crawling around on all fours! Someone had to do something, he said, but Ben threw up his hands. As he pointed out in the Letters, “I'd had trouble dissuading him from having a smoke in the intensive-care unit.”

  The family member who deserved most of the credit for keeping Cheever alive was his brother, Fred, who called every day and met John for lunch at least once a week. At the age of sixty-nine, Fred had begun to mellow somewhat after many fitful years of trying to find himself—to carve out a niche worthy of the name Cheever. A few years before, he'd left idyllic Boulder after his children had taken up their lives elsewhere, and now he was back on the South Shore, selling ad space for various radio stations and weekly newspapers—one job after another, each ending with the inevitable clash between Fred and his employers, than whom he always knew better. “Your [job] title and year in which you assumed it,” the Dartmouth Alumni Department benignly inquired in 1971, to which Fred snapped, “Communications Time-peddler, 1970—don't be silly.” Nor was it only station managers and newspaper editors and alma maters who had to be straightened out, but also the president of the United States and his benighted minions. “Dear Mr. Nixon (sic),” read a typically opprobrious salutation to a 1970 letter in which Fred demanded to receive a refund for overpayment of his income tax, lest he withhold future taxes in protest against the war in Vietnam. Two years later, he also berated John Ehrlichman about an “inept” comparison the man's boss had made between modern America and Disraeli's England: “This, to my mind, is the heart of Mr. Nixon's own problem. He has no sense of continuing world history, no weltgeist, no historical perspective as it really is and not as he wishes it to be.”

  Fred's own Weltgeist (he remained something of a Germanophile) was much affected by the campus protests of the time—or rather vice versa, as he saw it, since he regarded himself as a kind of proto-hippie who was “a college drop-out way back in 1926;” in the years following, to be sure, he'd lost his way amid the “corporate chairs” at Pepperell (albeit as “one of the young centaurs … [who had] introduced many of the current advertising and marketing methods of the industry”), but eventually he'd “walked out” because he was “stultified” (as opposed to being fired for drunkenness), and now was living life on his terms: a free man. Thus Fred explained the background of a book he completed in 1970, Who Are the Revolutionaries? The Coming Revolt Against the Middle Class, which he envisaged as essential reading for “the 18-25 college guy and doll who wants … some justification for his or her protests.” The agent Perry Knowlton at Curtis Brown decided to “encourage” Fred on the basis of a lukewarm report from one of their readers, who'd found Revolutionaries “potentially an excellent manuscript,” though it didn't quite hold together (“I don't catch the connection between the discourse on Henry Adams … [and] the diatribe against the middle-class”).

  Duly encouraged, Fred concluded it was only a matter of time before he was climbing the best-seller lists. A few weeks after he received that encouraging report, he wrote his son in Hawaii, “If the book delivers the money I expect, Honolulu is on my itinerary.” Such was his con
fidence that he began planning other books and articles, rather than revising his previous book as suggested. Of a piece titled “Quo Vadis Advertising,” Fred advised Knowlton to sell it to The New Yorker since, after all, his name was Cheever (“Perhaps I've delineated in non-fiction what my brother has been writing about all these years”); he informed his brother that he'd gotten started on a new book about the communications industry (“I would hope that it would make McLuhan appear very much out-dated and superficial”) and wanted to know how to go about applying for a Guggenheim. (John tactfully replied that applicants usually had to publish at least one book first, whereupon Fred wrote back asking for a loan of six hundred dollars “or whatever part of that you might be able to dig up.”) For almost a year Fred bombarded Knowlton with harangues about the marketability of Who Are the Revolutionaries?—as witnessed, say, by the Weltgeist-shaping success of Charles Reich's The Greening of America, which proclaimed the triumph of the hippie lifestyle and thereby “covered the same ground” as Fred's (even more marketable) book. Finally Knowlton wearily returned the manuscript: quoting one of Fred's many pitches, he wrote, “Perhaps, as [one reader] said, ‘it should be published,’ but I'm really not enthusiastic enough about the book to be the man to do the necessary selling job.”

  Fred remained undaunted, since he was optimistic by nature and had long ago incorporated failure into his personal philosophy (“there is a kind of destiny … that takes a toll of some sort which we get back in the form of new experience”). For a while he continued to think his book would ultimately be published and become “quite an influence for good,” but in time he let go of his literary ambitions and devoted himself to playing the part of a local eccentric in Plymouth: a plump old man with longish hair who liked to rap with the kids and roar around town on his motorcycle. His brother, John, couldn't help being reminded of their mother (who'd played a not-dissimilar role in Quincy), and tended to report that he and Fred were “estranged.” Dennis Coates was therefore surprised when he interviewed Fred for his dissertation in 1973, learning that the man loved and admired his brother and had always assumed the feeling was absolutely mutual. “I thought, ‘This is important’ “ Coates recalled. “ ‘John needs to appreciate this.’ “

  Up to a point, he did. “Poor Fred began to drink again and is in the hospital with heart trouble,” John wrote Coates the following year. “However he is showing uncommon intellectual and physical stamina and will live. What a family.” After decades of chagrin, John was moving toward a sort of amused (if still rather wary) acceptance of Fred—admiration, even. If nothing else, the man had persevered despite killing setbacks, proving his mettle as a Cheever and serving as a kind of bellwether for John's own decline and eventual resurrection. Notably, Fred's alcoholic relapse in 1974 would be his last. A social worker at the hospital had urged him to take a hard look at his past in order to understand why he drank, but Fred (very like his brother) would have none of it: “I don't want to go back,“ he said, “I want to go forward! And if you can't help me with that, you can go now.“ The man went, while Fred henceforth resolved to become a devoted (rather than occasional) member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  In his brother's company, however, Fred never seemed to proselytize. Whether John was drunk or (relatively) sober, Fred loved listening to his stories—”funny and very relevant”—and was simply thrilled to be reunited after so many years. One day John was entertaining a student, Rick Siggelkow, when Fred arrived for lunch in a very odd-looking car with a bulbed horn attached to the driver's side. (“What's this?“ Siggelkow furtively murmured to his teacher, who sighed, “Oh, just something he put on his car.”) Invited to come along, Siggelkow was fascinated by the dynamic between the two. John got things started with a bit of generic patter (“Can you believe it? Here we are, a couple of old men living alone in furnished rooms”), but Fred was determined to draw Siggelkow into their conversation, with the apparent object of building up John: “How's the class going? Isn't John a great teacher? Isn't he a wonderful writer?” Speaking of John's work led to a certain amount of reminiscence on Fred's part about family and friends who'd appeared in fictional form, and every so often he'd pause to explain these alter egos to Siggelkow. “He knew John's canon inside and out,” said the latter. “I kept waiting for some nugget to drop about the role of the brother [in John's work], but it didn't. Fred seemed cheerfully oblivious of the fact that he himself was a recurring character.” Meanwhile, no matter how many martinis he drank, John remained keenly alert in Fred's presence, ready to pounce the moment his garrulous brother went too far—as, for instance, when Fred inquired about Mary: “John just froze up,” said Siggelkow, “and Fred knew enough not to pursue it.”

  • • •

  THE OTHER FAMOUS PERSON in the BU writing program was the poet Anne Sexton, whom Cheever found “aggressive” and mostly avoided. The two had met at a faculty dinner hosted by the dean, where both engaged in a kind of caustic banter meant to shock their less illustrious colleagues and perhaps each other. Ivan Gold remembered sensing a “visceral distaste” between the two; Brinnin and Star-buck tried to distract the dean and his wife at the other end of the table: “Did they overhear that?” the two men worried with each new explosion of naughtiness from Cheever and Sexton. Whatever their incompatibility otherwise, both were alcoholics who'd distanced themselves from family in order to drink in peace, and Sexton somewhat endeared herself to Cheever by spiking his coffee with vodka at tedious faculty meetings.

  Sexton killed herself on October 4, 1974, and Cheever “never quite got over this.” Even though Sexton had been suicidal for most of her adult life, nobody really expected it: her friend Brinnin was under the impression that she'd “never been so happy,” whereas Ivan Gold had found her “sardonic, nervous, full of a crazed energy.” For his part, Cheever seemed to regard the tragedy as emblematic of the whole ghastly situation—aspects of which included the apathetic, feckless administration of a “fourth rate” university near an embalming school in an utterly, utterly dismal part of Boston. Cheever boycotted the memorial service, threatening to resign on the spot and go home.

  But home to what? Over Thanksgiving his family tried to rouse him out of his funk with the usual “shark tank” persiflage, an occasion to which Cheever was decidedly unable to rise. “Susie said that I put on a rather bad show,” he wrote Coates afterward, “and I shall try to do better at Christmas.” This was not to be. Returning to Cedar Lane a month later, Cheever appeared to be on the verge of death—an impression he soon confirmed by coughing uncontrollably and turning blue. This, of course, was the same old heart trouble, and once again he went to the hospital and stayed a few days to dry out. Perhaps to underline the gravity of his predicament, a young priest visited his “extraordinarily bleak” room at Phelps. Cheever, wearing pajamas, bemusedly knelt on the linoleum floor and received Holy Communion, then said “Thank you, Father,” and watched the man depart.

  Back home he demanded a drink, and when his family protested, he asked if he might take a Valium instead; given the go-ahead, he swallowed three and poured himself a drink. During the Christmas feast, a hush fell over the table as he tried to eat peas: time after time, suspensefully, the trembling fork ascended, only to spill its savory burden at the crucial moment. At last a spoon was suggested. “I regret to tell you,” said Cheever (putting the fork aside), “that you have a father who is dying.” A look went around the table, and Federico said, “We have a father with a taste for melodrama.” This eased the tension somewhat, though it was precisely the sort of thing Cheever was apt to find “unfeeling.” On New Year's Day, he became enraged when his family advised him to eat lentils “in order to ensure an income”: after crashing upstairs to his room, Cheever yanked the cover off his bed and fell over backward, unconscious.

  “So I am heartily sorry,” he noted exactly one year later. “We have all survived.”

  * His great-uncle Thomas Butler, that is, the Newburyport abolitionist and would-be biscuit ty
coon whom Cheever generally insisted on calling “Ebenezer.”

  * Speaking here in a 1994 BBC documentary, Updike was doubtless paraphrasing Cheever's remark about him in a 1965 letter to Exley (quoted on page 350), which Updike had posthumously discovered on page 245 of the Letters: “[Updike's] work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.”

  * Much of an early draft of Falconer was written on Cheever's “Bay State Road” stationery which doesn't necessarily mean he wrote it in Boston; probably he used the stationery simply because he had a lot left over. Be that as it may the draft affords a fascinating glimpse of how Cheever worked when inspired. Page after page is virtually unpunctuated, unparagraphed, unrevised in any way, yet the actual words are almost identical to the published version.

  *If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: Putnam, 1974).

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  {1975}

  THOUGH HE'D ALMOST DIED over the holidays, Cheever returned to Boston for the spring semester and the situation duly deteriorated. Sadly he reported to the Friday Club that the place was “straight asshole” and his students had become “sluggish.” He'd persuaded Updike to visit his combined classes for a two-hour Q&A session that Cheever abruptly terminated after less than an hour (evidently startling Updike), because his overawed students had proved unresponsive. “You had an opportunity to ask John Updike questions,” he subsequently told them in a seething voice, “and nobody said a damn thing.” After that, he seemed to give up. He went through the motions, more or less, but didn't bother to disguise his drunkenness or do much in the way of teaching. He also kept a rather flexible schedule. “Should we go looking for him?” his worried students murmured one day when he was fifteen minutes late for class. An expedition was forming when they spotted their teacher shuffling past the door. “Mr. Cheever?” they called. “Mr. Cheever?“ An elegant voice floated down the hall: “Ye-esss …?” “We sort of talked him back into the room,” one student recalled. “He returned with this big grin and went around the table kissing all the women and shaking hands with the men.” That was a relatively good day. More and more Cheever seemed utterly unprepared, and would either read one of his own stories or just sit there looking depressed until his students gradually drifted away. One youth expressed his contempt by removing his shirt, climbing on top of the circled desks, and stalking around the room while Cheever gazed at him in quiet puzzlement.