Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  It was tough for Cheever, too. Determined not to get involved in anything “furtive or compromised,” he repeatedly reminded himself, and Max, that he was as red-blooded as the next fellow … more! He'd been married for thirty-six years, raised three splendid children, and was dating a famous Hollywood actress, who, it so happened, had come to New York just the other day and had lunch with him: “She is terribly pretty and good company but I am not, this afternoon, deeply in love,” he wanly admitted in his journal, while writing Max that the “taste of [Hope's] lipstick on [his] mouth” had helped him endure “a tedious interview with Knopf.” Lange, whether or not she actually excited him, served the imperative purpose of proving that he was “in there swinging” where women were concerned: “I will not abdicate my position in the procreative, heterosexual world,” he rallied himself—but alas, all too often this sort of thing just didn't help much. The facts remained: his marriage was moribund, he rarely saw Hope, and he couldn't stop thinking about Max. Between desperately asserting his manhood and tentatively declaring his love, Cheever's letters to Max began to assume a kind of contrapuntal quality. “That a man of sixty-four should fall in love with a graduate student seems to me highly unlikely and perhaps it will seem so when we meet again. … I could not describe the importance of your embrace. I truly wish you no trouble.” And a week later: “I think of this as a great back-slapping friendship in which no one is lonely and I don't want to get into your pants.”

  Max was perhaps relieved to know as much, though it hardly mattered by then. The die was cast. Everybody knew he was bound for the fabled East: Sponsored by John Cheever to spend three months at Yaddo! Hero of the Utah writing program! And even if he were to have second thoughts—and he had them—what possible reason could he give for staying? The only thing that remained to be done for his Ph.D. was a dissertation—his novel—and he could write that anywhere. He was thirty-two. It was time to leave home and hope for the best.

  “How cruel, unnatural and black is my love for Z[immer],” Cheever wrote that spring. “I seem to mean to prey on Z's youth, to drive Z into a tragic isolation, to deny Z any life at all. Love is to instruct, to show our beloved what we know of the sources of light, and this may be the declaration of a crafty and lecherous old man. I can only hope not.”

  IT WOULD BE HARD to overstate how important the success of Falconer was to Cheever. It wasn't simply another Bullet Park-like critical debacle he feared, but also the awful prospect that his novel would be perceived as even remotely confessional. Meanwhile some of his most well-meaning colleagues had mixed feelings. Malamud had congratulated Cheever on the “extraordinarily good detail” of the whole prison experience, while alluding to the curious resemblance between Farragut and the author, and admitting, worse, that he didn't “deeply feel [Farragut's] suffering or growth of compassion.” (Graciously—and rather tellingly—Cheever agreed: “There is some spiritual ungainliness about the man that makes him barely worth saving.”) Cowley's response was similar: he thought individual aspects of the novel were “extraordinary,” but Farragut didn't “seem to [him] all of a piece.” Both writers apparently had a hard time believing that such an otherwise civilized—not to say familiar—personage as Farragut could also be a bisexual, incarcerated, fratricidal drug addict. What Cheever clung to, in moments of terrible doubt, was the wholehearted endorsement of the present Nobel laureate: “Well, I expected the best and that's exactly what I got in Falconer,” Bellow wrote. “It's splendid. … You should sell hundreds of thousands of copies, unless the country is farther gone in depravity than I think.”

  Bellow wasn't wide of the mark, oddly enough, though this wasn't entirely due to the country's discerning readership. Rather, Susan Cheever's influence at Newsweek—coupled with the ecstatic enthusiasm of their reviewer, Walter Clemons—had moved the editors to consider putting a writer on their cover, something they permitted only once every two years or so.* Cheever had been summoned to lunch at the Newsweek Building, where he was careful to eat no more than a single lamb chop (“I didn't want them to think I was a rube or hungry”) while the editors asked him a lot of questions and eyed him rather doubtfully. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Then one of them said that with my face on the cover there would be a drastic drop of newsstand sales but then another man said this was true of all serious writers. After this I went out on a local and called Knopf to tell them the news and the PR man said, ‘I've been successful.’ “

  The Newsweek feature would include an interview between the subject and his daughter (“A Duet of Cheevers”), for which Susan came to Cedar Lane on a cold, rainy afternoon in February. For five hours the two sat in front of the fireplace, and Susan, in her introduction, evoked the Cheeverian ambience of the scene with the same good effect as Alwyn Lee's Time piece thirteen years ago (“Three golden retrievers lie before the fire on an Oriental carpet …”). After a couple of hours, the two began to relax and talk more like father and daughter, and during this phase of the interview the following (published) exchange took place:

  Q: Did you ever fall in love with another man? I mean, because of the homosexuality in Falconer, people are certainly going to ask you that.

  A: The possibility of falling in love with a man seems to me to exist. Such a thing could happen. That it has not happened is just chance. But I would think twice about giving up the robustness and merriment I have known in the heterosexual world.

  Q: Well, have you ever had a homosexual experience?

  A: My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of 9 and 11.

  Thus Cheever seemed to brush the matter aside with an easy quip. In fact, as Susan recalled, the moment was quite a bit more fraught than the text suggests. “I have had many, Susie,” said Cheever—then, marking the startled look on her face, he added with the usual tremor of laughter, “all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of 9 and 11.”

  The Newsweek cover was scheduled for the March 14 issue, and in the meantime the early reviews of Falconer seemed to indicate that critics were either staunchly in favor or staunchly opposed. A few days after Susan's interview, Cheever was contacted by the Saturday Review: John Gardner's piece was so enthusiastic that they were sending a photographer to Ossining. “John Cheever is one of the few living American novelists who might qualify as true artists,” Gardner raved. “His work ranges from competent to awesome on all the grounds that I would count: formal and technical mastery; educated intelligence; what I call ‘artistic sincerity,’ which implies, among other things, an indifference to aesthetic fashion … and last, validity, or what Tolstoi called … the artist's correct moral relation to his material;” as for Falconer, it was “an extraordinary work of art.” Cheever wrote in his journal that Maxwell had taken credit for this coup (“Bill calls then to say that this was his doing”), and it was also Maxwell who gently alerted him to the “noncommittal” Time review. Cheever rushed into town looking for the February 28 issue, until he found one in a drugstore. The photograph, he thought, was “ghastly,” and the review wasn't much better. “Falconer is strong on feelings,” wrote R. Z. Sheppard, “even though they often overflow the novel's loose structure.” Not only was the structure loose, but the strong feelings tended to be expressed in terms of “sententious observations” about the suffering of prisoners and so on: “Another sententious observation would be equally true,” Sheppard sternly pointed out (as if the book in question were a sociological tract): “crime's victims are no strangers to grief.” Absorbing this, Cheever had a “bad few hours,” but finally was able to persuade himself that Time had “shit on [the book]” by way of undermining the imminent Newsweek feature.

  For the crucial daily Times review, Cheever had petitioned Lehmann-Haupt to ensure the services of John Leonard, lest the job fall to another Times reviewer, Anatole Broyard: “[Leonard] is sympathetic and I can't forget what I've been told about Anatole's review of Bullet Park.” Cheever presumed to ask such a rare
political favor in exchange for having agreed—at Lehmann-Haupt's urgent request—to write a Thanksgiving piece for the Living section, “Thanks, Too, for Memories.” Unhappily for Cheever, Harper's had already commissioned a review from Leonard, and the review was bad: “Whatever happened to suburbia?” Leonard wrote, proceeding to take Cheever to task for deserting his proper subject in favor of distasteful, sensational material. “It is as if our Chekhov … had ducked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing the cape and leotard of Dostoevsky's Underground Man.”* Since Leonard wasn't available for the Times review, and Broyard had been blacklisted, Lehmann-Haupt went ahead and reviewed Cheever's “extraordinary new novel” himself: “After a first reading … I could report that I had devoured it hungrily, marveled at the grace of its prose, been given nightmares by its early passages, and come away from it with a sense of a world set right.” That left Joan Didion's front-page notice in the Times Book Review of March 6, and although Didion had never been anything but lavish in her praise of Cheever, he worried all the same (“the rivalry between novelists is worse than the rivalry between sopranos”). But she, too, thought Falconer an “extraordinary new novel”—its author a consummate artist, whatever the ethos of his fiction. “‘Falconer’ is a better book than the ‘Wapshot’ novels, a better book even than ‘Bullet Park,’ for in ‘Falconer’ those summer lawns are gone altogether and the main narrative line is only a memory.”

  A few days later Newsweek hit the stands (“A Great American Novel: John Cheever's ‘Falconer’”), and demand for the book exploded—unfortunately, there were no copies available. The first printing of twenty-five thousand had already sold out, and Knopf had yet to fill orders for forty or fifty thousand more. Cheever expected his agent to intervene, but Donadio was slow on the uptake. “My agent's brain seems gravely damaged,” he angrily reflected. “I may call Knopf this morning and break my relationship but very little would be accomplished.” Instead he decided to get rid of Donadio, albeit with such exquisite politeness that the woman hardly knew what hit her—only that Cheever was suddenly cool on the telephone, and eventually wrote her a gracious note: “I have neglected to thank you for your part in FALCONER. … It was you who got me the advance that let me imagine the book, it was your restraint that saw me through two heart attacks as well as drugs, alcohol and suicide without a nagging letter and it was your confidence in the book that helped it through its rather confused reception at Knopf.” Having written as much, Cheever hired a lawyer to sever the connection; Donadio (“a Jewish den-mother,” he once described her) was “devastated”: “We did like each other a lot for a long time,” she later mused, proposing that she'd been fired because she knew too much about her client's bisexuality, and not (as Cheever explained to a friend) because she'd “gone completely insane.”

  All's well that ends well. Gottlieb saw to it that eighty thousand copies of Falconer were rushed to the stores, and the novel spent three weeks at the top of the Times best-seller list—ultimately selling almost eighty-seven thousand in hardback and over three hundred thousand in its first paperback edition. While it was still number one, Cheever wrote his daughter a note: “The lesson let us help one another was not lost on you.”

  “I LIKE TO THINK of Falconer as the sum of everything I've ever known and smelled and tasted,” Cheever told Newsweek, and this may be as good a way of explaining the novel as any. Beyond the elaborate prison metaphor—flawlessly detailed yet oddly dreamlike, as in much of Cheever's best fiction—Falconer is perhaps his most deeply personal work: a tabulation of his own singular afflictions, ordered as a parable of sin and redemption. That said, the narrative bristles against the logic of a pat allegory (or pat anything), and readers who attempt to fit Falconer into any kind of formula are liable to be a little confused. “Tentatively—very tentatively—one would have to say that it is about coming to terms with humanity through the medium of homosexual love,” Lehmann-Haupt awkwardly ventured, while John Leonard (who'd managed one of the most ingenious critiques of Bullet Park) pretty much threw in the towel: “Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Falconer absorbs and often haunts. As a whole, it confounds.”

  As with Bullet Park (“Paint me a small railroad station then”), Falconer opens with a resonant image:

  The main entrance to Falconer … was crowned by an escutcheon representing Liberty, Justice and, between the two, the sovereign power of government. Liberty wore a mobcap and carried a pike. Government was the federal Eagle holding an olive branch and armed with hunting arrows. Justice was conventional; blinded, vaguely erotic in her clinging robes and armed with a headsman's sword. The bas-relief was bronze, but black these days—as black as unpolished anthracite or onyx. How many hundreds had passed under this, the last emblem most of them would see of man's endeavor to interpret the mystery of imprisonment in terms of symbols.

  Having begun on a symbolic footing, the novel proceeds from there: Farragut is identified in terms of his sin and punishment (“fratricide, zip to ten”), and the place he inhabits, cellblock F, is “a forgotten place. Like Piranesi”—or, as the prison guard Tiny puts it, “F stands for fucks, freaks, fools, fruits, first-times, fat-asses like me, phantoms, funnies, fanatics, feebies, fences and farts. There's more, but I forget it. The guy who made it up is dead.” It also stands for Farragut, Falconer, fratricide, forgotten, and so forth, and is a place of perfect forlornity—a purgatory where one may pause to consider one's predicament with little in the way of consoling distraction. Indeed, at the beginning of Farragut's captivity, the only relief from loneliness is the company of cats (“They were warm, they were hairy, they were living and they gave fleeting glimpses of demonstrativeness”), which are presently massacred. Lest one abandon all hope, however, we have it on the authority of Chicken Number Two—the mascot of cellblock F, prophet, Greek chorus, embodiment of human destitution—that Farragut's imprisonment is “a terrible mistake,” that something good awaits him once he gets “clean” of addiction and its various impurities.

  Until then, Farragut's alienation is complete. “Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction.” His addiction helps ease a painfully keen awareness of his own homeless-ness in the world, an “otherness” that becomes so explicit at Falconer that his sense of time and space are “imperiled” (notably, on arrival, his watch is stolen by a fellow prisoner); ultimately, he feels so disoriented that he has to ask Tiny for occasional reminders of his whereabouts: “Tiny understood. ‘Falconer Prison,’ he would say. ‘You killed your brother.’ ‘Thanks, Tiny.’” As for the pressures that have driven Farragut to such an outcast state (“Why is you an addict?”), certain familiar Cheeverian bêtes noires are suggested. There is, for one, the comically hateful wife who visits Farragut in prison only to mock and revile him—part of an old dynamic between the two, as we learn from flashbacks. Once, Farragut remembers, she'd taken off to Rome with an old friend (a woman of “very unsavory sexual reputation”), and when he tried to celebrate her return by cleaning house and lighting fires and buying flowers, she responded by curtly asking for a Campari: “Campari will remind me of my lost happiness.” Farragut's own homecomings have been even less successful. Returning from a rehabilitation center in Colorado, he'd explained to her that his drug-damaged heart could not tolerate excitement, whereupon she pointedly slammed a door (“The effect to his heart was immediate”), and then slammed it again. Such murderous malice, on the part of putative loved ones, even preceded Farragut's birth. “One of his mother's favorite stories” concerned the time his father had invited an abortionist to dinner “in order to kill Farragut,” and his brother Eben had also made attempts on his life—inviting him to go for a swim in Chilton Gut (a “well-known deathtrap” of sharks and riptides, as a stranger informs Farragut at the last instant while Eben runs off down the beach), and later pushing him out of a brownst
one window and almost impaling him on a fence of iron spears. “[Father] wanted you to be killed,” Eben taunts his brother at last. “I bet you didn't know that. He loved me, but he wanted you to be killed. … Your own father wanted you to be killed.” Little wonder Farragut strikes back at his “hated origins” by trying to brain his brother with a fire iron.

  Up to that climactic moment, the novel proceeds in a series of eddying digressions—memories, set pieces, particularly “Browningesque monologues,” as Gardner pointed out—the last a long-standing element in Cheever's work: to give two random examples, an incidental shoeshine man in “The Superintendent” confides at length that the smell of shoe polish gives him dirty thoughts, and a military chaplain in The Wapshot Chronicle harangues Coverly about his neglected church services and other sorrows. Such outbursts serve little purpose but to remind the reader, in passing, of Cheever's most abiding theme—loneliness, the terrible need to connect—and nowhere is the device more aptly pervasive than in Falconer. “Oh my darling,” Farragut writes to “a girl he had lived with for two months when Marcia [his wife] had abdicated and moved to Carmel” (the girl is never mentioned again). “Last night, watching a comedy on TV, I saw a woman touch a man with familiarity—a light touch on the shoulder—and I lay in bed and cried. … I do not love, I am unloved, and I can only remember the raptness of love faintly, faintly.” Even his loathsome brother Eben achieves a fleeting poignance in recounting an extravagant attempt to communicate with his wretched wife by wangling an appearance on her favorite game show, Trial and Error. Having fallen off a tightrope into a water tank before a studio audience, Eben rushes home and excitedly asks his wife if she caught him on TV. “ ‘She was lying on a sofa in the living room by the big set,’ “ he tells Farragut. “ ‘She was crying. So then I thought I'd done the wrong thing, that she was crying because I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, “What's the matter, dear?” and she said, “They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!” Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can't say that I didn't try.’ “ Eben's monologue is characteristic—a futile confession of loneliness, a voice crying out in a wilderness of other tormented, self-absorbed people. (“Stop fussing with my breasts,” says the narcissistic Marcia to her husband. “I'm beautiful.”) As for the prisoners of cellblock F, one by one they speak their pieces but remain forsaken, nightly retiring to a long cast-iron urinal called the Valley, where they stand without touching and “fuck [themselves].”