Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Farragut's redemption begins with his love for Jody, though he worries at first that this, too, may be so much lonely narcissism (“If love was a chain of resemblances, there was, since Jody was a man, the danger that Farragut might be in love with himself “). But while Jody is both vain and loquacious, he's also “a very good listener,” and his monologues tend to be somewhat instructive—as when he lectures Farragut on the proper way to smile: “‘It has to be real. You can't fake this selling smile. … Now watch me smile. See? I look real happy—don't I, don't I, don't I, but if you'll notice, I keep my eyes wide open so I won't get disgusting wrinkles.’ “ Far from narcissistic, Farragut's love affair with Jody is all but selfless, leaving him both bereft and lighthearted when Jody flies away in the cardinal's helicopter. The rest of Jody's escape, though not ostensibly from Farragut's point of view (as is the rest of the novel), may be understood as a figment of his imagination—a hopeful fantasy foreshadowing his own liberation, which likewise will be assisted by an “agent from heaven”: “It is exciting, isn't it?” the cardinal remarks to Jody, leading him to a Manhattan clothing store and then, twenty minutes later, setting him free on Madison Avenue. “[Jody's] walk was springy—the walk of a man going to first on balls, which can, under some circumstances, seem to be a miracle.”

  After Jody's departure from the novel, some forty pages of filler ensue—namely a long, mostly superfluous sequence about the riot at “Amana” (based on Attica), its effect on the guards and prisoners of Falconer. (“And what do I intend?” Cheever wrote, as he entered the final stretch of work on his novel. “A story about a man of forty-six who enters prison. He falls in love with Jody, who escapes; he is visited by his wife; he suffers the agony of drug withdrawal; and he escapes. You've got to have more narrative in your bag than that. So he must have some failed escapes. Other attempts and other relationships.” The Amana scenes provide much of the latter.) These pages are diverting enough, though perhaps the only indispensable part is when the prisoners are kept from rioting by having their pictures taken beside a Christmas tree. Asked to complete a form giving the name and address of some loved one who will receive a print, Chicken Number Two writes, “Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Icicle Street. The North Pole”: “The photographer smiled broadly and was looking around the room to share this joke with the rest of them when he suddenly grasped the solemnity of Chicken's loneliness. No one at all laughed at this hieroglyph of pain, and Chicken, sensing the stillness at this proof of his living death, swung his head around, shot up his skinny chin and said gaily, ‘My left profile's my best.’ “ The compassion of the other prisoners, as well as Chicken's own blithe stoicism, prepare the reader for Chicken's role in the rebirth and liberation of Farragut.

  Shortly after learning that he no longer needs his methadone fix (“You've been on placebos for nearly a month. You're clean, my friend, you're clean”), Farragut takes the dying Chicken into his cell and washes his elaborately tattooed body. Himself a somewhat priestly figure now, Chicken confesses Farragut (“Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?”), then grants him a kind of absolution, providing guidance into the mysteries of life and death:

  “How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party [i.e., dying] when it's like a party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. … I like you and I don't like the Cuckold and it's that way all down the line and so I figure I must come into this life with the memories of some other life and so it stands that I'll be going into something else. … I'm very interested in what's going to happen next.”

  Dying, Chicken gives life back to Farragut—goading him, after a fashion, to get out of prison and start over: “Oh, Chicken,” Farragut cries, realizing he's been sitting on the dead man's false teeth, “you bit me in the ass.”

  Stowed in Chicken's burial sack, Farragut leaves prison feeling a sense of boundlessness, a happy unburdening of his former self: “How strange to be carried so late in life and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh …” On the outside he is greeted almost immediately by a stranger—an “agent from heaven” who, as Chicken foretold, takes a knowing shine to him (“I like your looks. I can tell you got a nice sense of humor”) and helps Farragut re-enter the world with the gift of a new coat, a new identity. “Stepping from the bus onto the street, [Farragut] saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice.” In art, at least, all things are possible.

  MAX ZIMMER HAD two younger sisters who lived in New York, and a week or so after Falconer was published—the very week when Cheever's face was on display at almost every newsstand in the country—he flew east to take his youngest sister home to Utah in a drive-away car. She was only nineteen, and recently her older sister had led the family to believe that the girl was having suicidal thoughts.

  Prior to his departure, Max had accepted an invitation (“And bring your sisters!”) to lunch at the Cheevers’; he thought it might cheer things up a bit to show off his “great back-slapping friendship” with a famous author, though during the meal he worried that his sisters would say or do something gauche. Fortunately it seemed to go well enough, and afterward Cheever offered to show him the Croton Dam.

  They drove there in Cheever's brown VW Rabbit, and after a brief walk alongside the roaring landmark (“in spate”), they returned to the quiet of the car. “This is the second-largest cut-stone mortised structure in the world,” Cheever was saying, “and one of the last things to be seen by Neil Armstrong …” Max, who'd been admiring the structure in question, glanced at his companion and noticed his penis was out of his pants. With a slight tremor of laughter, Cheever left off chatting about the dam and suggested that Max “play with it.” This, the young man realized, was the proverbial turning point:

  Here I was. With a man in his Rabbit, in a totally alien place to me. A man I'd pretty much staked everything on at this point. My sisters were down at his house with his wife, one of them was suicidal, and I thought, you know, “What if I say no? We're going to drive back to his place. He's going to raise hell, throw us out of the house, throw my sisters out of the house, and it's going to devastate my sisters, especially the one that I'd been told was suicidal.”

  Given what had happened at the Lake City Motel, perhaps this shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, and, truth be known, Cheever was hardly one to “raise hell” when his advances were rejected; still, Max worried he'd somehow be put in the wrong. Also, on whatever level, he sensed he was being punished. He'd left the church and deeply wounded his father—maybe he deserved this. “So anyway,” he bleakly recalled, “I jerked him off. And it was just a gruesome thing to have to do.”

  “I say goodbye to Max precisely as I say goodbye to a very good friend,” Cheever noted, benignly enough. “We may never meet again.” Max, meanwhile, drove his sister across the George Washington Bridge in a heavy rain.

  * Bellow had been the last (September 1, 1975), because of Humboldts Gift; before that, Joyce Carol Oates had been featured (December 11, 1972) around the time of Marriages and Infidelities.

  *”It doesn't seem fitting for me to write John Leonard but if you see him please tell him how accomplished I thought his review,” Cheever wrote Lehmann-Haupt on May i—bearing in mind perhaps that Leonard was a good man to keep in his corner, and after all the success of Falconer was assured by then.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  {1977}

  THE DOWNSIDE of Cheever's Falconer fame was that many people did, in fact, assume he was gay. “Is your father a homosexual drug-addict?” people asked Susan (in effect) for years to come. Cheever was disinclined to evade the issue entirely. He didn't consider himself gay, of course, though he freely admitted to Hope Lange that he'd had a homosexual affair once (sic) because he was “terribly lonely,”
but didn't care to discuss it. Also, when Dick Cavett suggestively inquired whether he'd “turned a corner in Falconer,“ what with its homosexuality and violence, Cheever manfully pointed out that such themes were hardly new to his work.* But there were times, to be sure, when all the speculation got him down. For one thing, he kept getting calls from members of the Aesthetic Realism movement, devoted in part to the conversion of homosexuals. A young man (one of Cheever's lovers, as it happened) was visiting Cedar Lane when Cheever received such a call: “Look,” he heard Cheever say, “don't you dare call me here again, or I'm going to take action against you!”

  Mostly, though, he was deeply gratified by all the attention. Granted, the sound of his “fruity accent” was a little dismaying when he watched himself on Cavett, but then the mail started pouring in—hundreds of letters from discerning, lonely people all over the country. “I'm having a marvelous time,” he wrote Gottlieb, noting that he'd just earned the “undying love of the President of the True Value Hardware Store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.” When he appeared on Cavett again the following year, he made a point of saying he answered all his letters, in the hope of receiving even more. “I think of myself as a fat boy,” he wrote in his journal, “who answers all his fan mail with loving letters with the unseemly ambition, it seems, of gathering to himself more friends than his competitor enjoys.” Nor were readings and book-signings the sort of morbid chore they'd been in the past; on the contrary, Cheever was avidly curious to see what kind of readership a book like Falconer attracted. “I'd be honored,” he said, when the proprietor of a local bookstore—who'd hitherto found Cheever “unapproachable”—diffidently offered to host a signing the week of the Newsweek cover. (“They expect hundreds,” Cheever gleefully wrote Weaver. “Mary plans to appear, towards the end of the afternoon, frightfully drunk, disheveled and with a torn dress that shows one breast. ‘A Star is born,’ she is going to scream, ‘but only I know that the prick has toe-jam.’ Confusion. TV cameras.”) A year later, when he was more famous still, Cheever hired a limousine to take him to Caldor's, a vast department store where he signed books near a woman “demonstrating a food-chopper”: “The customers and I are utter strangers,” he mused. “We laugh. We blush. I sign a book. Here is that experience of intimacy we try so hard to explain. We are, in short, not alone.”

  He even consented to a modest book tour, which included a stop at the Greater Boston Book and Author Luncheon. Boston, he decided, was not such a bad place when viewed from a high window at the Ritz (“That the struggles of my late adolescence were battled out on the streets is impossible to recall”), and the various TV, radio, and print interviewers treated him like a favorite son. At the book luncheon he sat on the dais with the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge and Garson Kanin, each of whom stood to give a little speech plugging his book. “My name is John Cheever,” said he when his turn came, “I was born in Wollaston.” Then he sat down. During the autograph session that followed, Falconer was the only book that sold out, and among the mob around Cheever's table was a group of Thayer students brought by Headmaster Benelli, who'd last seen Cheever, two years before, standing on Commonwealth in a drunken stupor. This time Cheever was “cordial but shy,” chatting briefly with students and signing a copy of Falconer for the Thayer library. When the school librarian wrote to thank him, she alluded to his local legend by urging him to return to Thayer and “snatch a smoke” on the grounds. “I am very happy to think of my novel in the library at Thayer and when I next come to Boston I shall certainly visit my old school,” Cheever replied, with gracious insincerity.

  By far the most controversial item on his agenda was an appearance at the International Conference of Writers at Sofia, Bulgaria, in early June 1977. A few months before (the day after his return from Utah and points west, in fact), Cheever had received “a delegation of Bulgarians who came down the icy driveway carrying wine, brandy and red roses,” he wrote Litvinov. “They were like the jolliest of my friends in Moscow.” Cheever would always be susceptible to such jollity: it heartened him to reflect on his high reputation in the Soviet bloc—where he was known as “the naive optimist”—and, especially in later years, he was so keen on returning that his family joked he would be “the first western writer to defect to the East.” Not everyone was amused, however. That year the Bulgarian president, Todor Zhivkov, had brutally cracked down on social unrest in his country: some forty thousand party members had been purged, and a number of dissident writers hauled off to jail. Amnesty International called for a boycott of cultural activities in the country, while Soviet poet Vladimir Kornilov had appealed directly to Cheever, Updike, and Erskine Caldwell to renounce their participation in the writers’ conference. “Bulgaria seems quite dark,” Cheever wrote a friend. “The Russians called yesterday to ask exactly what my position will be. I keep saying that Mr. and Mrs. Cheever have accepted with pleasure the cordial invitation of the Bulgarian government and look forward very much to meeting the charming people of this friendly country and to admiring their celebrated landscapes.” Tanya Litvinov was especially grieved by Cheever's attitude, and told him so in no uncertain terms. “You may have forgotten what I am like,” he benignly replied. “Last summer the Romanians scornfully described the people of Bulgaria as possessing nothing but fresh vegetables and new, crusty bread. That's what I'm looking for, that and some escape from the fact that Falconer is an enormous success here and that it is not in my disposition to be famous.” But Litvinov was far from the only friend who found such “innocence” appalling; at home, Eleanor Clark and Red Warren thought Cheever had “succumbed to [the] flattery” of a despicable regime, and regarded his conduct as “ignorance to the point of real evil, almost.”

  The truth was somewhat less dire. One is bound to repeat that Cheever was not a politically minded man, and he really did adore the warm, demonstrative people of Russia and Eastern Europe (“we embrace and shout in unison ‘La grande poésie de la vie’ “)—the whole “agrarian unspoiled literary culture” that had embraced the universal themes in his work. Cheever wished to show his solidarity with such people—and bask in their adulation—without alienating political leaders with principled gestures one way or the other, which in any case had proved worse than futile. In 1969, when Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, Cheever had found the “stupidity and clumsiness and brutality, in fact, of the Russians” so egregious that he'd agreed to sign an international letter of protest with fifteen other cultural figures (chosen for their popularity in the Soviet Union), including Sartre, Updike, Arthur Miller, Stravinsky, Vonnegut, and Günter Grass. “And that was absolutely the end,” he remembered. For years, all letters from Litvinov and others were stopped, and various Russian artists vanished from the public eye with scarcely a trace (“I guess the most conspicuous proof of their loss of freedom of speech is the fact that Yevtushenko, who has the biggest mouth I've ever seen in my long life on the planet, has been silenced,” Cheever observed in 1976).

  Besides, the Bulgarians really had been extravagantly flattering. Theirs was the only Soviet-bloc country publishing Falconer in translation—the Russians had banned the book because of its “perversions”—and moreover the Bulgarian ambassador, Lyubomir Popov, had paid a personal visit to Cedar Lane for Easter dinner. After a game of football (Susan and Philip Schultz versus Ben and the ambassador's chauffeur), Popov was conducted upstairs to the library, where he “unbuttoned his vest and cut a fart,” according to Cheever. Tipsy with bourbon, the man bragged about how adroitly he'd dealt with LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and so on, until Schultz said something mildly deflating (“Oh, so American presidents come and go, but you outlast them all?”) that infuriated His Excellency. Mary, Ben, and Susan tittered, but Cheever looked grim and later admonished Schultz for speaking out of turn.

  On his return from Bulgaria, Cheever promptly reported to Litvinov that the trip had been “thrilling”: “What political or social significance can one attach to swimming in the Black Sea? The English-speak
ing group consisted of Lord Snow, Gore Vidal and Anthony Powell [but not Updike or Caldwell]. I am, of course, a sentimental man, but it truly seemed to be a display of our capacity to enjoy one another. No more.” No more for Cheever, anyway, who was particularly delighted to be reunited with Yevtushenko—not a whit worse for wear after his recent disgrace with Soviet officialdom. The flamboyant poet danced with Mary Cheever on a Black Sea beach, and dazzled his admirers wherever he went—rather to the disgruntlement of Gore Vidal, or so it seemed to Cheever, who liked to tell the following story:

  We kissed the mayor [of Sofia] and headed for the mountains in the limousine. This was Gore, Zhenya [Yevtushenko], Mary and me. In the snowy uplands we were met by throngs in peasant costume who danced and sang and set fire to a small lamb. Zhenya was in top form which is rather like watching a man pitch a no-hitter while playing the Rasamouvsky quartette at a moon-landing. Gore who does not eclipse gracefully, was burning. Anyhow we danced with the peasants and ate the lamb and when we left perhaps a hundred people gathered around Zhenya reciting his poetry and asking him to autograph their shirttails. Gore, who had stopped speaking, was writing postcards to Paul Newman. Our chauffeur, it seemed, was drunk and racing down the mountain we nearly went off a cliff. When some helpful peasants had put the car back on the road Gore said: “Had we gone off the cliff I would have gotten all the headlines.” Zhenya brushed a feather off his knee and said, “only in the west, only in the west.”*