Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  But Cheever did not give Halpern the impression of a man so “happily” engaged: “I remember feeling sorry for Cheever. … There was a wanness about him.”

  In January 1978 he took Mary to Russia, stopping in London to see Tanya Litvinov, who also noticed a wanness of sorts—odd, since Cheever seemed to have everything now: money, fame, sobriety. Frieda Lurie met the Cheevers in Moscow and took them to a plush suite at the Sovetskaya, thence to tea with Premier Kosygin's daughter and many cultural events, including a serenade of “Hold That Tiger” as played by the Novgorod High School Band. The whole experience, Cheever wrote Cowley, was “profoundly disturbing”: “Some of the Russians by now are close friends … and to say goodbye there in the snow is an experience that it takes me weeks to comprehend.” At other times he said the trip was simply exhausting—”not worth it”—and indeed the whole thing seemed a blur, as did all his other travels during the past eight months or so, going back to Bulgaria. “I seem these days to be intensely unhappy,” he'd noted a few weeks before Russia, wondering if he'd still be alive in the spring: “This strikes me as obscene and contemptible. And yet I do suffer hours of loss that are quite painful and that I used to bridge with bourbon and gin.” Not only had he begun thinking about suicide, but talking about it too: his AA sponsor, Bev Chaney, remembered the subject coming up “fifty, a hundred times” (“I wonder what it feels like to die”).

  When he returned from Russia, a seeming reprieve appeared in the form of a letter from Max—the first in months. Cheever plucked it out of the piles of backed-up mail and read it greedily: “He hinted at the indifference of his marriage and hinted—no more—at his love for me.” This changed everything. All at once Cheever decided his life had been a sham (“a competent performance but a performance is always lacking”): He was gay, by God, and happy to say so for the moment, at least, in his journal. He promptly arranged a tryst in Saratoga for the following week, and called Max “twice a day” in the meantime to declare his love, unbothered by any trace of objectivity as to the young man's motives. As Max remembered:

  I would try to buy myself time and clarity periodically by procrastinating in answering his letters and phone calls and by putting off any visits for as long as I thought I could get away with. This was true particularly for the period after my marriage. But it always got to where I believed I'd pushed him off dangerously long, long enough to where he would get fed up, end things, and do what he could to punish me.* … I knew that when I wrote the letter [in January] that he would want to see me, and that I was out of reasons for putting him off. … He arranged the rendezvous in Saratoga and I went.

  The visit was something of a milestone for Cheever, to whom the greatest taboo about sleeping with a man had always been the actual sleeping with him: back-slapping friends might “get their rocks off” together, but only true homosexuals woke up in one another's arms. This time, however, he crossed the Rubicon. “After spending a night contentedly with you and your cock,” he wrote Max afterward, “I expected to gain two hundred pounds, to make sucking sounds with my mouth when I asked for the pepper at breakfast and to invest in a yellow wig. … We must part, of course, but I think our parting will be as natural and easy as our meeting was.” Cheever was, in fact, relieved to find that he and Max were “quite simply friends” in the morning, but (as he feared) there had been a certain awkwardness about finding himself in bed with a man—that is, once he'd gotten his rocks off. Waking in the middle of the night, Cheever had observed Max drinking whiskey and watching a bad movie, and had to admit that the young man was “far from a figure of any interest” at that moment. He tried to bear this in mind whenever he repeated the mantra—again and again in years to come—We must part: they were married men, after all, and at bottom Cheever had little desire to confess such an affair to the world.

  On the other hand: he was still plagued with “capricious erections” and, without Max, what was an old man to do? “There are the matter-of-fact problems of my loneliness and my punctual accruals of semen that must be discharged,” Cheever mused. “These seem as simple as the problems of a car, stuck in deep snow. One gets a shovel.” On balance, then, he decided to postpone any sort of definitive valediction; when the time was right, surely Max himself would say something, and for now they were simply friends who helped each other. “Neither of us is homosexual and yet neither of us are foolish enough to worry about the matter,” he wrote his friend reassuringly. “If I want your cock or your mouth I know I have only to ask and yet I know there is so much better for you in life than my love that I can think of parting from you without pain. This, of course drives my cock up the wall.” And how did Max feel? “Filthy and repulsed and bewildered and mortified and with no sense of reality for what I'd had to do and filled with his bullshit about how happy this all was,” he recalled. “I always felt relieved, too, that it was over. The sense of having reset the clock … I could start from zero again in racking up time away from him until it came due again.”

  So Max went back to Oswego, while Cheever lingered in Saratoga for a few weeks, brooding about things (“And so what I seem to be afraid of is the voice of the world. … ‘Have you heard? Old Cheever, crowding seventy, has gone Gay. Old Cheever has come out of the closet. Old Cheever has run off to Bessarabia with a hairy youth half his age’ “). Every afternoon, he and Anne Palamountain—the Skid-more president's wife—would go skiing at the state park, and on Sunday they attended early services at Bethesda Episcopal and then had breakfast at the Gideon Putnam. “Every woman needs a man who's a friend she can tell anything to,” said Palamountain, and Cheever was such a friend to her. This, however, did not work both ways. Once, when Cheever suggested that two of her other men friends—a dance critic and his athletic companion—were a couple, she answered as follows (so he reported to Max): “ ‘That,’ Anne said sternly, ‘is a purely platonic friendship. If it were anything else I would not entertain them.’ “ Therefore Cheever told the woman funny stories and kept his brooding to himself. Later she learned of his bisexuality and felt “terribly guilty” when she remembered how “troubled” he'd often seemed: “But we never discussed it, or else I was too obtuse to pick up on his hints.”

  CHEEVER WAS AT LOOSE ENDS in his work, too. The only matter that seemed “urgent” enough to write about was his own bewildering alienation, so he clipped newspaper articles about the possibility of life on other planets (“WATER DETECTED OUTSIDE EARTH'S GALAXY”) and vaguely considered writing a novel about “cosmic loneliness.” But his main project was a teleplay titled, tentatively, The Hounds of Shady Hill. In December he'd had lunch with Jac Venza, an executive producer at New York's public TV station WNET, who wanted Cheever to adapt three of his stories for television; Cheever had no objection to other writers’ adapting his stories, but the only project that he personally wanted to pursue “as a lark” (larky as opposed to lucrative, since he'd only be paid Writers Guild minimum) was an original teleplay As luck would have it, Venza thought this perfect for their projected series, American Playhouse, which would feature original works by American writers—a riposte to those who thought public television “[spoke] only with a British accent.” Cheever had long toyed with the genre, from his Signal Corps days to his abortive work on Life with Father and even The Rules of the Game, and now there was a rather compelling personal reason as well: he wanted to collaborate with Hope Lange, which just might add a spark to their tired affair and reinvigorate his interest in the “procreative world.” “I'm really working on the WNET show in which you play all the parts,” he wrote Hope in April. “I really want to write a smashing show within the confines of traditional TV and I also want to work with you.” So that, at least, was something to look forward to.

  Meanwhile his literary life seemed disproportionately concerned with applauding the successes of Saul Bellow. On his return from Saratoga in late February, Cheever presented Bellow with the Gold Medal of Honor from the National Arts Club—only nine months after he'd presented B
ellow with the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Bellow, of course, was the living author Cheever most admired (as he'd recently reiterated in the Times), all the more so since Humboldt's Gift: “Saul's genius is inestimable,” Cheever had reflected while reading the novel. “With Saul on the team the game is real and the stakes are not self-aggrandizement … fame and wealth.” So naturally it was a pleasure to see genius rewarded, especially given Cheever's personal fondness for the genius in question, though the Nobel Prize was perhaps too much of a good thing. On the bleak autumn day when Bellow was named the winner, Cheever took a dejected walk with Gurganus through Central Park, starting a little when they came to the statue of the nineteenth-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt: “Oh my God!” he said. “They're already putting up statues!” But once his initial dismay had passed, he gladly conceded the “exemplary and tireless grace” Bellow had shown as laureate*—this while presenting that first gold medal in 1977, an occasion he remembered when presenting the second in 1978: “Saul was in Jerusalem and the medal was accepted by Tom Guinzburg, his publisher, and was, I like to think, the first time in the history of literature in which a writer has enthusiastically given a publisher a piece of negotiable gold.”

  That same year—that same month, in fact (February 1978)—Cheever had been passed over for the Academy's Gold Medal in the Short Story, a decision that Cowley protested as “outrageous”: Cheever was the “best short-story writer” in the country, he wrote the committee, whereas, of the three writers nominated—Updike, Peter Taylor (the eventual winner), and Mary McCarthy—the last wasn't even “essentially a short-story writer.” Cowley was subsequently informed that, as a matter of fact, Cheever had been suggested by every member of the committee; however, since he'd already received the Howells Medal, it “was mentioned” (passive voice) that perhaps they should “spread the honors around.” Cowley was emphatically unpersuaded, pointing out that at least three previous Gold Medal winners—Faulkner, Cather, and Welty—had also received the Howells Medal. Finally it fell to Cheever himself to enlighten his old friend:

  The difficulty may be with Bill Maxwell who, having put me above Updike for years, now feels that I have had more than my share of everything and should be rebuked. It doesn't matter to me at all. … I gave a reading last night that included THE SWIMMER and I would much sooner have written that story—without a gold medal—than anything that has so far been accomplished by my dear friend Updike.

  The difficulty had indeed been with Maxwell, and the motive was rather dubious, as he later admitted (“This has remained somewhat on my conscience”). He explained the matter as follows: While vacationing on Cape Cod during the summer of 1977—that is, a few months before he met with the nominating committee—Maxwell had been contacted by a Times reporter, Jesse Kornbluth, who was writing an article on Cheever. “I put [Kornbluth] off until I had called John to find out how he felt,” Maxwell remembered. Cheever professed to take a dim view, and therefore Maxwell declined to be interviewed. When the article appeared, however, Maxwell was furious to learn that Cheever himself had cooperated fully with Kornbluth—telling the infamous Telephone Story (about which more below) in the bargain, and making Maxwell (as he later put it) “look like a heel”: “I thought, Why should I go on furthering John's career when he tells these whoppers about me?”

  One can well imagine Maxwell's anger over the Telephone Story. After all, it was primarily Maxwell who had first seen to it, forty years earlier, that Cheever's work appeared regularly in The New Yorker; it was Maxwell who had insisted that The Wapshot Chronicle receive the National Book Award; it was Maxwell who had brought yellow roses to Cheever's bedside when he was ill, who had rarely failed to give heartening advice and encouragement when it was most crucially needed, and who did believe, incidentally, that Cheever was the best American short-story writer. All that said, however: the invidious Kornbluth article (“The Cheever Chronicle”) did not appear in the Times Magazine until October 21, 1979—almost two years after Maxwell suggested that the Gold Medal nominating committee “spread the honors around.” In other words, it is more accurate to say that Cheever's Telephone Story was in reprisal for the Gold Medal imbroglio (to say nothing of Cheever's suspicion that Maxwell had colluded in screwing him financially for many years) than vice versa.

  At any rate, herewith the Telephone Story, which was based—very loosely—on the occasion when Cheever had asked Maxwell for a raise in December 1963.* As Cheever related to Kornbluth (my own comments appear in brackets):

  “I recall … that at the time of my first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle [actually a few months after he completed the Scandal], I had no money, I had holes in my shoes, it was raining [snowing?], and I was coming down with a cold. I had published nine stories in The New Yorker that year [circa the Chronicle, Cheever published five New Yorker stories in 1956, one in 1957; he published five in 1963, when the incident actually took place], and they had won every prize you can get [?]. … So I went to The New Yorker and said, “What will you give me for a piece of the book?” [By the “book” he presumably means the Chronicle—several installments of which Maxwell enthusiastically accepted for the magazine—but in any case that wasn't the vital issue in 1963.] … Bill Maxwell said, “I can't tell you.” I said, “I can't work that way.” He said, “All right, I'll tell you,” and he made me an offer of, I think, $2,000. And I said, “Bill, I can get more.” “There's the phone,” he said [well-meaningly, as Maxwell would have it]. “Try.” I said, “How uncivil,” and I went downstairs and called my agent.

  “She phoned me in the morning [she phoned him a few minutes later, via a pay phone on the street] and said, “I've tried one magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and they've offered $25,000 [$24,000 for a first-look agreement and a minimum of four stories a year, not for a “piece” of The Wapshot Chronicle]. Should I try somebody else?” And I said, “No, let's rest on that.” It was terribly funny because The New Yorker called and asked if, by chance, anyone had offered more money [actually Cheever had promptly returned to Maxwell's office and informed him of the Post offer, whereupon Shawn and Hawley Truax were summoned to remonstrate with him]. I said someone had, so they gave their counteroffer, which was a key to the men's room and all the bread and cheese I could eat [not exactly]. And I said, “Well, what the hell, I'll stay with The New Yorker [true].”

  Apart from the vindictive element, it's possible Cheever had gotten on a raconteurish roll and simply told the story for laughs, the way he usually told stories—for the sake of entertainment rather than posterity—and, for what it's worth, Cheever himself was furious about the Kornbluth article. But anyway the damage was done: Maxwell and he stopped talking, and a number of mutual friends took Maxwell's side (Newhouse, for instance [rather happily for Cheever, perhaps], no longer made himself available for lunch). And yet it bears repeating that Maxwell had blocked his friend's Gold Medal some two years before the Telephone Story—and really, taken altogether, it was neither man's finest hour.

  TO A REMARKABLE DEGREE for a writer of his reputation, Cheever was still ignored by academia, and so he'd been rather excited to learn that Dennis Coates had returned to the States, at last, to defend his dissertation—the first book-length study focusing exclusively on Cheever's novels. Coates's approach had changed drastically, however, as a direct result of that episode in the woods four years earlier, which had led to an epiphany of sorts: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I've got to go back and reread all the books and really get it this time’ … and there it was! It was all there. So that really allowed me to put the thing in perspective for the dissertation.” The “thing” was Cheever's bisexuality, which for Coates had become a sort of skeleton key unlocking the real meaning of Cheever's work. “My life has always been an open book,” the latter calmly replied, perhaps failing to consider the full implications when Coates mentioned his discovery. In any event, after receiving his Ph.D. from Duke that spring, Coates eagerly mailed his subject a copy of the
dissertation—which began by boasting its author's “knowledge of John Cheever, the flesh and blood person,” followed by a long biographical profile that proved as much. “I read Denny's dissertation,” Cheever wanly noted, “in which he concludes that I was, as a child, a tubercular shut-in with a manly brother. In order to conceal my homosexuality I married, made my wife miserable and bitter and finally rose to greatness in my last novel by admitting my love for cock.”

  This précis is simplistic, but not inaccurate. Having made the point that the protagonist of each novel is “overtly modeled on the author,” Coates invites the reader to consider the “oddity” of the “homosexuality theme,” insofar as it “often surfaces without the benefit of a clear connection to what may otherwise be a fairly coherent creation. … Inevitably, explanations of these problems lead to revelations about the novelist himself.” And that's not all: “This idiosyncrasy [i.e., the homosexuality theme] is closely related to what … appears to be the author's misogyny. … It is likely that this perspective is based on personal experience. Indeed, it accounts for the tenderness and humanity with which Cheever develops the homosexuality theme.” So it goes for a couple hundred pages, more or less. Given what must have been his mounting, ineffable horror, Cheever's reply to Coates was impressively temperate: “My congratulations on having completed such a difficult task. I do find it particularly distressing when censure is involved in an assessment of my work and my life. You copiously quote from a man who obviously gets a stick prick at a blade of grass and you conclude that this has destroyed the women around him. I can't agree.” Coates was mystified by what appeared to be a somewhat hostile reaction (“an open book”?), and promptly gave his favorite writer and good friend a call—but Cheever was “cold,” and soon hung up.*