Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  When Cheever was released on May 7, his prognosis was “guarded” (“Consensus is that p[atien]t is so wrapped up in self that there is no room for anything else”). Ruth Maxwell had laughed out loud when Cheever suddenly announced that he'd never drink again, but Dr. Robert de Veer was convinced Cheever had actually accepted that he was an alcoholic and therefore had no excuse—be it a bad marriage or a banal TV show—for drinking, ever. One of Cheever's students in Boston had been particularly skeptical that such a drunken man could ever get sober, and one day he received a postcard from his old teacher with a terse message:

  “See?”

  * According to Maxwell, the anniversary party was “staff only not even spouses, much less contributors.”

  * See prologue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  {1975}

  TO GO FROM continuous drunkenness to total sobriety is a violent wrench,” Cheever wrote, the day after he'd been “sprung” from Smithers. “Laughter seems to be my principal salvation.” In certain ways, he had plenty to laugh about. There was the sheer absurdity of being sober and nothing but, as well as the fact that he suddenly looked and felt twenty years younger. Lila Refregier, his old girlfriend from forty years ago, had seen the 1969 Sheed article in Life and been saddened by how bloated and boozy Cheever seemed; in 1977, however, she caught his first appearance on The Dick Cavett Show and found him “as young and handsome and well groomed as ever.” Around that time, John Hersey described the sixty-four-year-old Cheever as looking “like a man of 34 who has been to a hilarious but awfully late party the night before.” Until Smithers, he could hardly walk uphill to his mailbox without huffing for air; now he had energy to burn, and before long he breezed into a department store, grabbed a five-speed bicycle off the rack, and rolled it to the checkout counter. The clerk began to protest that he'd grabbed the pre-assembled demonstrator, but Cheever slapped his money down (“This is the one I want!”) and walked out. For the next few years, he took long bicycle rides almost every afternoon: either the five-mile “large circle” or two-and-a-half-mile “small circle” around the extended neighborhood; when he needed a breather, he'd pull up to a random driveway and help himself to the Times, popping it back in the tube after a thorough perusal and pedaling away.

  He felt a powerful urge to mend fences, though this would prove something of a mixed blessing. Deeply ashamed of the Boston interlude, he promptly wrote Starbuck “a lovely kind note” (as the latter recalled) regretting that he'd been such a disappointment as a colleague, and also, of course, he thanked Updike, whose “immense kindness” in taking over his classes had undone some of the chaos of his “sinister and obscure departure.” The process of making amends was facilitated, in turn, by the eagerness of “people from the remote past” to resume their friendships with Cheever now that he was sober. Meeting friends again without the benefit of alcohol, however, was practically tantamount to meeting them for the first time—a bit of an ordeal for such a shy and hypersensitive person. Lunching with Newhouse a month after Smithers, Cheever was reminded that his friend was a “very decent man,” yet he found himself becoming “bored to the point of questioning [his] reason.” Tom Glazer, too, if such things were possible, seemed even duller than Cheever remembered—ditto the entire Friday Club, whose members would later speak with great jollity about how Cheever, sober, had served them larger drinks than ever (“giant martinis in jelly glasses”), the poignant subtext being that he was simply trying to make them a little interesting. When even the company of his jaunty old friend Don Ettlinger seemed a letdown, Cheever was tempted to blame himself: “I wonder if one of my alcoholic self-deceptions was the illusion of boyish charm.” One day a mutual acquaintance, Marion Ascoli, joined him and Ettlinger for lunch in Tarrytown—a “somewhat labored” occasion that became even more so when Cheever drove her home: “I used to be an alcoholic,” he ventured after a long silence. “Yes,” said Ascoli, “I'd heard about that.” Silence. “My marriage is breaking up.” “Oh, that's a shame.” End of conversation.

  For the rest of his life, AA meetings would serve as his main source of social diversion. Two or three times a week, he'd drive to various parish houses around Westchester, usually after dinner when the urge to drink was strongest. Fred helped him get started by going along for a few meetings right after Smithers, pleased to find himself back in a mentorly role vis-à-vis his little brother: “[If John] can do [AA] on an amusing and semi-humorous basis,” he wrote his son, “it will be a great help to him and I'm quite sure, a lot of fun for all those who attend the meetings.” This would prove a prescient summary of his brother's AA experience. Cheever continued to find absurd the whole metaphysical aspect of AA (“lack[ing] the coherence of a redneck cult”), but, that said, it was the only thing that worked—a constant reminder that alcoholism was “an obscene mode of death.” And then, quite apart from the therapeutic benefit, Cheever did manage to enjoy himself after a fashion. He found solace in the simple mantra “My name is Jawn and I am an alcohaulic,” and if called on to speak further, he rarely failed to entertain. Luxuriating in his persona as a rather seedily genteel old lush, he'd wryly tell of past and present sorrows: his “wife of a hundred years” who wasn't speaking to him, his children whom he'd never really understood, and so on.

  Mostly Cheever was keen on listening to others tell their stories, the better to recycle them into funny anecdotes and perhaps even fiction. “He certainly didn't respect anybody's confidence,” Federico recalled. “Much as he made fun of the sentimental, badly told tragedies, I think he ate them up and I think they kept him straight.” Some of the more dreadful scenes at AA meetings would excite a peculiar dialogue between the charitable, sober Cheever and the malicious rogue he now sought to repress. Watching a pathetic old man in an “ill-fitting suit” accept a cake with thirty-eight candles commemorating his long, long sobriety, Cheever was tempted to point out that “he could have done as well dying of cirrhosis, but that would be sinful.” That would be sinful: What Cheever kept learning from AA was that being sober was a matter of sacred dignity, and that people from every conceivable class and background could be essential to one another. Only with fellow alcoholics could he comfortably discuss his own loneliness and bewilderment. “ ‘Yesterday was a memory, tomorrow is a dream,’ says a man who is dressed like a gas pumper and has only three front teeth,” he wrote in his journal. “From what text, greeting card, or book he took the message doesn't matter to me at this hour.” At other times, to be sure, he might laugh at such a chestnut—but such laughter (“acid, scornful and motivated by pitiable defensiveness”) was an irksome betrayal of the better person he longed to become.

  He was fortunate in his choice of sponsor, Bev Chaney, a bookseller who had a deep and appreciative knowledge of Cheever's work. Almost until the day of his death, Cheever relied heavily on the man to keep him sober. Whether he was feeling a little blue or (often enough) suicidal, his sponsor was an unfailing anchor—ready at a moment's notice to help him over a bad patch with a bicycle ride or meeting. The two also spent a fair amount of time visiting other alcoholics in trouble, an aspect of AA that meant a lot to Cheever. When Hope Lange told him that her brother David was drinking too much and refusing to go to AA, Cheever insisted he had no choice and called him immediately: “I will not allow you to hurt yourself,” he said. “Now stop it.” Such was his reputation as a successfully reformed drunkard (an almost unheard-of phenomenon among American writers of the first rank) that even Truman Capote sought his help—again and again and again. “We really need you, Truman,” said Cheever on the telephone, while lunch guests waited for him to return to the table. “We need your prose. …” As Cheever stood there precisely rediscussing the reasons Capote should check himself into Smithers (as Capote would, eventually, with less enduring results), he grimaced and rolled his eyes for his guests’ benefit.

  The fact was, a part of him chafed at being perceived as “a fucking do-gooder”: it was galling to remember his mother's ban
dage-rolling for the Red Cross, her delight in giving “skinny chickens” to the poor and so forth; on the other hand, Cheever owed his life to the kindness of fellow alcoholics, and felt an inescapable sense of obligation. Perhaps his most extended effort was in behalf of Zinny's son, Dudley Jr., who'd opened a restaurant in the area and then (as Dudley Sr. put it) “took to sampling his own liquor.” Having watched the young man's mother drink herself to death, Cheever took Dudley to AA meetings and tried to be something of a father to him. “We play backgammon,” he wrote in his journal. “[Dudley] is so stupefied with drugs and drink that the game is meaningless. … I put my hand over his and say: ‘This is not right, this is not right at all. You are drugged, you are lost.’ He mumbles some agreement but I know from my own past how little he has heard, how little he cares.” Cheever took almost every possible measure to save the man: he phoned various family members (one of whom was in Jamaica at the time), confronted doctors, and finally drove to Dudley's house and insisted he get in the car. “You're an alcoholic like me,” he said. “I'm going to take you to Phelps, and that's going to be it.” After drying out, Dudley went to a rehabilitation clinic in New London, Connecticut, and was sober for almost a year—then relapsed, and relapsed again, until finally Cheever despaired of him. (“I preferred him to my own father,” said Dudley after Cheever's death. In 1987 Dudley himself died, age forty-five, of a brain embolism.)

  As perhaps some Higher Power appreciated, it was burden enough looking after one's own salvation. A month after leaving Smithers, Cheever chided himself: “I make the sign of the cross a dozen times a day. Cleanse the thoughts of my heart, etc. Rejoice, rejoice. Can't you take this as a gift given? Must you, like a broody child, remark that the toy that fills your heart with pleasure will soon be broken and thrown away?”

  IF CHEEVER HAD HOPED that sobriety would improve his marriage, he was soon disabused. “I've changed violently,” he wrote, “but nothing else seems to have changed. Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow.” Mindful that his drinking had been “a grave problem,” and given that he was, by nature, averse to confrontation, Cheever tried to show his contrition with deeds rather than words. As his daughter recalled, he seemed to realize for the first time “that the house wasn't cleaned by gremlins,” and diffidently inquired how one went about working the dishwasher and such; he also learned to feed himself in some rudimentary way. His newfound self-reliance, however, would have to be its own reward. That first summer post-Smithers, he cheerfully welcomed his wife back from Treetops with a batch of groceries he'd bought all by himself: “I lean for a kiss. There is none. If my questions are answered at all they are answered with a sigh. The groceries I brought are worthless, the corn is questionable, and would I mind if it is thrown away? ‘Not at all!’ I exclaim, which means that it will be served. This is perversity and madness.” He tried to remember that his “grave problem” had taken an awful toll over the years, abrading “the excellence [he knew] Mary to possess;” he also bore in mind (“with profound sympathy”) her miserable childhood, the thought of which sometimes moved him to lavish acts of tenderness. Once, she returned from an antique store in Pleasantville, bemoaning the fact that she'd left behind a gorgeous, chrysanthemum-patterned Imari bowl because it was too expensive; while she was cooking dinner, Cheever slipped out and bought it for her. “He changed and she didn't,” said their daughter, though Mary didn't see it quite that way: “He was perhaps a little more civil,” she reflected, “and occasionally put on an act of being very loyal and loving. Sometimes it was credible, sometimes it wasn't.”

  Perhaps as a further goodwill gesture, Cheever returned with her to Treetops early that fall. Another incentive might have been the absence of Mary's “mad sister,” Buff, who in 1972 had been hit by an express train in Pennsylvania—her body obliterated without a trace, or so legend has it. (“I will not speculate or comment,” Cheever noted on hearing the news, “except to say that Mary loved her very much.”)* The visit served as a final reminder of why he'd declined to go back (but once) these many years: the house was frankly shabby, its furniture and rugs having “missed their date at the municipal dump,” and the main topic of conversation, still, was the Winternitz patriarch, to whom everyone pithily referred as “MCW” (“Remember when he tore down all the windowshades and jumped up and down on them”). Driving back from New Hampshire with his wife, Cheever felt “relaxed and happy”—perhaps because he knew he'd never return, or bother to complain about his wife's returning.

  He began to get along with his children a little better, and to speak of them with pride rather than rueful malice: “Fred got honors at Andover and is (by my lights) marvelous,” he wrote Weaver. “Susie is an editor at Newsweek and Ben, very handsome and expensively dressed, is on the staff at Readers Digest.” It was a particular relief whenever Federico came home, since it meant that Mary was civil for the sake of appearances and Cheever had someone other than the dogs to keep him company. His relationship with Ben remained problematic. Even though the young man had gotten a better job at Reader's Digest, he still borrowed money on an almost monthly basis, as a matter of both necessity and principled hostility. Cheever was alternately bewildered (“I think he has felt that to succeed as a husband and father he must find me contemptible”) and hostile in turn. While a visitor bemusedly watched, Ben drove up to the house one day and asked his father, on the porch, if he needed anything in town: “Get me the number one best-selling nonfiction book,” Cheever muttered, whereupon Ben went inside, spoke with his mother, and departed without a further word (possibly to retrieve the book). Meanwhile Cheever enjoyed an enduring truce with his daughter. To a friend who'd recently sired a baby girl, he wrote advising the man to “put her little feet on the path” leading to a job like Susan's: “Thus she will have perfect teeth, lovers, husbands, a large salary and unlimited expense accounts.” This was admiration, albeit a trifle backhanded. Susan's “lovers,” after all, still included the “charming, corpulent alcoholic” Warren Hinckle, and Susan's own drinking made her father “uneasy.” “I got two clues that he was aware of this,” she remembered. “He took me to [AA] meetings, but he may have just liked having the company. Also, when we met for lunch, he'd already have ordered my drink. That's something alcoholics do for each other.”

  Despite a slightly improved domestic life, Cheever was often bored, lonely, and beset by terrible longings. Once his morning work was done, he'd invent reasons to get out of the house and go to the post office, the bank, the laundry—anything that brought him into contact with other people. Sometimes, still, he'd drop by Lang's hovel and invite the ex-convict to come have a beer later on, though Lang usually didn't show, and Cheever would have to find other ways to fill the time. “I write Lincoln Kirstein what I think is an entertaining letter and he returns a brochure with his initials and his address on the envelope,” Cheever noted that November; “and writing to Laurens [Schwartz], because I have little else to do, I think that my epistolary profligacy is a little absurd.” The highlight of Cheever's week was Sunday night, when the miniseries Poldark was aired on public TV: “Poldark! Poldark!” he'd excitedly announce, running around the house. The only drawback to Poldark was its lack of commercials, a genre Cheever had come to find oddly entertaining, even when they were “contrived, banal and obscene.”

  What he wanted most of all was a lover, since he could no longer rely on alcohol to drown his ravenous libido. Along with a renascent boyishness, however, sobriety had also brought with it a harshly objective awareness of what it meant to be pushing the age of universal retirement. “I love my son,” he wrote; “my cock can shoot a pint; these facts are as relevant as my daughter saying that I look like one of those old men who celebrate their last birthdays by swimming the river and whose unappetizing photographs are sometimes—but not always—printed in the paper.” Even at the best of times, the aging Cheever didn't think much of his looks: wincing at publicity photos, he'd remark that he had the “face o
f a ferret” and was, even worse, round-shouldered and short—reminiscent, he thought, of “the small museum guard in a worn uniform who says softly, ‘It is beautiful, isn't it?’ “ This was too bad, as Cheever found that most of his erotic urges were now definitely homosexual, and he was haunted by memories of the middle-aged Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, shedding his clothes at Craigie Castle almost half a century ago and standing there, plumply nude, while the eighteen-year-old Cheever fought back laughter and ran for the door. Found among Cheever's papers on Bay State Road was a letter from Gurganus, who'd written wistfully of their Sunday walks along the Iowa River and declared that his love was “without precaution or moderation.” The sober Cheever was apt to cast a coldish eye on this sort of thing (“Allan seems to be skirmishing again”), but when Ganymede appeared in person—as he did that summer of 1975 in Ossining—Cheever once again found himself ardently trying to hold hands while working the steering wheel (“A[llan] seems … to magnify the incongruities between my social and my erotic drives to the point of combustion”).

  Underlying such autumnal turbulence was a sense that time was short. Perhaps the most disturbing reminder of this was his spells of “otherness,” which, if anything, had gotten worse since he'd given up alcohol. A pre-Smithers CAT scan had indicated “severe atrophy of the brain,” which in Cheever's case seemed to affect his prodigious memory in curious, almost ineffable ways: “A strain of music, heard from upstairs, does not remind me of a moment in my past; it reminds me of a thousand moments in any place I may have been; Asia or southern Massachusetts.” In the midst of these “seizures,” or whatever they were, Cheever would forget where or even who he was; also, a certain elusive hallucination tended to recur, having something to do with Ginny Kahn and Exley standing on a beach in Cape Cod perhaps, the latter singing a forlorn jingle that Cheever couldn't quite parse. If he ever managed to possess the memory, he felt certain he'd go mad. Meanwhile, even on relatively lucid days, he sometimes felt an almost unbearable estrangement from the world: “I am in a bell jar or worse since I seem to respond to nothing that I see,” he wrote. “I remember being as depressed in Rome. A cigaret butt in a cup, a formation of dust under a table seemed to represent the utter futility of staying alive.”