Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  All this might have been very depressing indeed, had it not coincided with a far happier development in the academic world: namely, the announcement that Cheever would receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Harvard's 327th commencement exercise in June. As Cheever wrote in his journal (possibly drafting remarks for the press), “ To have been expelled from Thayer Academy for smoking and then to have been given an honorary degree from Harvard seems to me a crowning example of the inestimable opportunities of the world in which I live and in which I pray generations will continue to live.” Of the many honors that would presently be lavished on Cheever, this was almost certainly the one he valued most: Harvard was the embodiment of Boston respectability, after all, a thing mocked and contemned and deeply coveted by Cheever, even more since that disastrous interlude at BU three years before.

  On the great day, some fifteen thousand people gathered in the rain to hear Solzhenitsyn deliver a somber denunciation of the West (with its “revolting invasion of publicity … television stupor … intolerable music”). Since his name began with “C,” however, Cheever was first in the procession of honorees—”Aleksandr brought up the rear”—including Bart Giamatti, Vernon Jordan, Jr., and Sir Seretse M. Khama, the president of Botswana (“a marvelous-looking man,” said Mary Cheever). Hailed as “a master chronicler of his times,” Cheever would have been almost perfectly happy, at least for the moment, if only there were someone who truly shared his happiness; but as he confessed to the Israeli president's wife (“a loving Russian”), he'd been “cold and hungry and lonely” in his life, and fully expected to be that way again. Mary had hardly spoken to him for weeks—practically the status quo by now—and she didn't say much in Cambridge, either, save the odd pleasantry for the sake of appearances.

  Cheever's sense of utter destitution, despite his Harvard degree, was more than idle self-pity. Not only did he lack a sympathetic wife or lover, there really wasn't a soul on earth (except occasional strangers) to whom he could confide his sorrows. Bill Maxwell and he were no longer friends, Denny had betrayed him, and Max had carefully distanced himself since that meeting in Saratoga. “Your letter was so circumspect and humorless that I haven't known how to reply,” Cheever wrote Max in March, taken aback by what might have seemed a rather sudden lack of warmth. As for Hope Lange—never one for deep intimacies (“I don't really know you at all,” Cheever had recently remarked)—she too was gone for the time being. One day that spring, she casually announced that she'd sublet her apartment and was leaving for the Coast in the morning. “What are you doing tonight?” Cheever had asked, concealing his slight chagrin. She was having dinner, she said, with the playwright Robert Anderson. “Robert Anderson wrote Tea and Sympathy years ago,” said Cheever, “and has no other distinction.”

  * Cheever is alluding here to the observations (circa 1966) of David C. Hays, which evidently continued to rankle. The “carapace” or “social veneer” that Hays attributed to Cheever (quite insightfully) was, said Hays, primarily meant to “dissemble” Cheever's “basic hostility and alienation,” though perhaps Hays had also suggested that it dissembled his impotence, what with Cheever's constant talk about Hope Lange and the like.

  * That is, by harming Max's writing career in some way, though it seems doubtful Cheever would have done anything worse than decline to help Max further.

  * Bellow's grace was such that he'd mentioned a number of other American writers who were also “acceptable” candidates: Mailer, Ellison, Wright Morris, and Cheever.

  * See pages 318-21.

  * Three years later, another scholar (R. G. Collins) happened to mention Coates's dissertation during a visit to Cedar Lane, whereupon his amiable host “flared up”: “Oh he's totally discredited, he's not to be trusted at all! He went to see Fred, found him down and out, and got him to say a lot of lies …”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  {1978-1979}

  WITH THE SUCCESS of Falconer, many in the press wondered how it was possible that the short stories of (arguably) our finest living practitioner in the genre could be almost entirely out of print.* Newsweek called it “a scandal of American publishing,” though Cheever himself was undismayed. He prided himself on not looking back, and when Gottlieb suggested they publish an omnibus collection, Cheever seemed puzzled. “Why do you want to do that?” he asked. “All those stories have already been published.” But Gottlieb was certain the book would be a great success, and he was happy to take care of the whole thing: “I'll read every story you ever wrote,” he said, “and I'll make a selection and show it to you, and any way you want to amend it will be fine with me.” Cheever agreed, without much enthusiasm, though he expressly forbade the inclusion of anything from his despised first collection, The Way Some People Live, or, for that matter, anything previous to the stories collected in The Enormous Radio.†

  Cheever's reluctance to live in the past—to save letters, to speak of painful memories except in the privacy of his journal, and so on—included a profound reluctance to revisit his own work, an impulse he compared to “some intensely unhappy relationship with a mirror”: “The work is done and to return to it seems idle in the strongest sense of the word—a demeaning sense of time squandered.” Sometimes he claimed that he hadn't even bothered to read over Gottlieb's selection (“I would read three lines, and if they were all right …”), though in Time magazine he admitted that he had, in fact, overcome his usual aversion out of sheer curiosity: given the hundreds of stories he'd written in the past fifty years, he'd “totally forgotten some of them” and found reading them again a surprisingly pleasant experience. Indeed (as he wrote in his journal), he was occasionally “bewildered” by his own enthusiasm; while reading “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” for example, he laughed out loud and finally began to cry (“I miss being interested in my work”).

  Gottlieb had suggested he write a preface, which proved a small masterpiece of shrewdness and charm. Rather apologetically, Cheever pointed out that the present volume had been arranged (“to the best of my memory”) chronologically, and thus readers would have to endure the relative ineptitude of his early stories:

  The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.

  Nicely said, but of course the book opens with “Goodbye, My Brother”—one of Cheever's two or three greatest stories, written some twenty years after his first published effort and almost five years after the oldest piece in the collection (“The Sutton Place Story”); such “early” stories do not remotely entail the literary equivalent of learning to eat one's peas off a fork. Suffice to say, however, that if Cheever had seen fit to include work prior to 1946 (as opposed to destroying the evidence whenever possible), the reader might well have noted some “interesting alliances” to Hemingway, Chekhov, O'Hara, and Fitzgerald, to name a few. And though the mature Cheever had mostly assimilated his influences, there's a lingering trace of Fitzgerald, perhaps, in the most exquisite line of his preface: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” In his little essay for Atlantic Brief Lives, Cheever had argued that Fitzgerald—far from being a dated relic of the twenties—was a “peerless historian” whose period details evoke the “excitement of being alive;” similarly, Cheever's reminder of a city bathed in “river light” conveys an entire epoch in a sort of magical amber.

  The reception of The Stories of John Cheever was tantamount to a coronation, as reviewers seemed bent on topping each other's ecstatic, all but unstinting praise. Paul Gray of Time wrote that the
book “chart[ed] one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary letters;” William McPherson opened his front-page review in the Washington Post Book World by declaring that “John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best.” Such compliments seemed almost trifling, though, next to John Leonard's definitive proclamation in the daily Times: “It would be meaningless and impudent to commend one or another story in a volume that is not merely the publishing event of the ‘season’ but a grand occasion in English literature. For whatever the opinion is worth, John Cheever is my favorite writer.” A number of Cheever's fellow fiction writers were likewise eager to give the master his due: “John Cheever is a magnificent storyteller,” Anne Tyler wrote in The New Republic, “and this is a dazzling and powerful book;” “John Cheever is the best storyteller living,” said John Irving in Saturday Review; and once again John Gardner (who'd extolled the merits of Bullet Park and Falconer as if to champion a great cause) chimed in, calling Cheever “the dean of the contemporary American short story.”

  Amid all the superlatives, Cheever proved elusive to reviewers trying to define his place “in the stream” (as he would say). Gardner, a brilliant analyst of literary craft, remarked on Cheever's “postmodernist experiments”—authorial intrusion, self-parody, etc.—by way of concluding that the “stories are realistic in the best sense of the word, anchoring the dream in the concrete example, nailing the reader to the page with ruthless attention to detail character by character, scene by scene.” (One thinks of Cheever's advice to his Barnard student Judith Sherwin, the young woman who wanted to write magical realism: “put in a few signposts.”) Cheever's virtuosity is such that one forgets how subtly the sense of a dream persists in his otherwise “realistic” fiction, or, as the case may be, how reality persists in the midst of a dream. “The Country Husband” and “O Youth and Beauty!” both adhere to the conventions of realism, more or less, though they involve a highly intrusive, lyrical narrator (“it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains;” “Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues!”), and slightly off-kilter details (a pilot singing “jolly sixpence” as his plane goes down; a man shot dead by his wife while he hurdles the furniture). No wonder the critic Robert Towers—who had remembered Cheever's work as “surrealistic and bizarrely plotted”—was startled to find that relatively few of his stories (the novels are another matter) could properly be classified as nonrealistic. “The Enormous Radio” and “Torch Song” are anomalous among the early stories, followed by a long period of essentially realistic work, until “The Death of Justina” and the increasingly bizarre stories of the mid-sixties—”The Swimmer,” “The Ocean,” “The Geometry of Love”—which began to disconcert The New Yorker until (as Cheever would have it) Barthelme found acceptance as “Shawn's chosen surrealist.” But wait: “Although [Cheever] employs all manner of literary devices,” said Richard Locke in the Times Book Review, “he writes for the most part as if Borges, Barth and Barthelme had never been born. He is a realist with the longings of a lyric poet and a wish for allegorical revelations.” Perhaps, though one can't help wondering how Barth and Barthelme would have written if Cheever had never been born; at any rate, such a generalization suggests the bedeviling impulse on the part of critics (particularly academics) to find a writer's proper niche in the canon or “stream”—easily done in the case of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald (never mind Barth and Barthelme), but not so much in Cheever's. Which may explain why posterity would eventually abandon his cause, at least for the present.

  For the rest of his life, though, Cheever had the satisfaction of being duly canonized: he was “the dean of the contemporary American short story,” after all, and had written a few beguiling (if problematic) novels as well. Moreover he was a best seller—a “money player,” at last. “At the risk of sounding pious this is the first time a collection of short stories has been successful,” he observed to a journalist. “I'm hoping the editors of periodicals will begin to regard the short story as a legitimate form of expression.”

  UP TO A POINT, Cheever seemed to enjoy the acclaim and keep it somewhat in perspective. “There are a few PR demands on my time,” he wrote Weaver. “Yesterday afternoon Mrs. Vincent Astor sucked my cock in Caldors window for the benefit of the New York Women's Infirmary and afterwards I autographed copies of the collection.” While The Stories of John Cheever was dominating best-seller lists (its striking red cover and giant signature “C” an almost ubiquitous sight among the reasonably literate), Gottlieb gave the author a gala dinner at Lutèce, where Cheever found himself sitting between Lauren Bacall and Maria Tucci (Gottlieb's wife)—”bask[ing],” as he wrote Max, “in that fragrance of beaver we both so enjoy” (“I sit between two lovely women,” he wrote in his journal, “[and] think about my chum”). Bacall had kept an office at Knopf while working on her memoirs, and one day Cheever came in and flirted with her for half an hour or so. “He had an easy time talking to women and was good at it,” Bacall remembered, though any sort of sexual charge was, for her, somewhat vitiated by his “debutante accent.” Still, he was under the impression that the actress was “madly in love with him,” according to Mary Cheever, whom he left at home when Bacall invited him to a party at her Manhattan apartment. “I think Betty [Bacall] has got me mixed up with the late Adlai Stevenson,” he wrote his daughter afterward. “Why else would she keep sticking her tongue in my ear?” (Privately, he observed that Bacall had a “fourth-rate Bonnard over the sofa and—you guessed it—a large and ghastly Picasso over the mantlepiece.”) Bacall was also on hand to celebrate when Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award in January 1979 (beating out Irving's The World According to Garp and, better yet, Updike's The Coup)—one of a multitude, said Cheever, who'd vied for his favors that day: “I was kissed by both Mary Gordon [another nominee for Final Payments] and John Irving and John Updike telephoned from Georgetown,” he wrote Susan. “Your mother, of course, thought that GARP should have won. My humble remarks were greeted with an affectionate standing ovation and after having been kissed by about three hundred women and autographing things like deposit slips and shirt-tails your mother and I made our way, by spacious limousine, to 21 where there was a dinner for sixty in The Hunt Room, served by about eighty waiters. … Betty Bacall ate my right ear.”

  Cheever was more active than ever in public duties, becoming vice president of Yaddo and secretary of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (as it was now called), for which he also served a third term as chairman of the grants committee. It may have been the whole noblesse aspect of Academy work that appealed most, since for many years he'd been bored by his aging colleagues (a “death watch”) and had skipped the various dinners and luncheons whenever possible. Formal meetings were an even more terrible crucible, during which Cheever would chain-smoke and suppress groans of impatience (“He might go into the men's room and jerk off. He just might”). Worst of all were the hundred or more novels he was supposed to read as chairman of the grants committee—autobiographical first works, mostly, in which the characters occupy themselves (as Cheever put it) with “wiping the steam off a windowpane and wondering what is the meaning of it all.” Had he lived longer, anyway, it seems safe to say he would never again have served on the grants committee. “I suspect that my tastes, with old age, have become parochial and cranky,” he wrote his colleagues that year. “I have, for example, just completed a book called BIRDY. This is about a demented man who would like to fly. My passion for gravity seems to have increased with age and I am constitutionally disinterested in a weightless life. … Considering the general mediocrity of the year I suppose we should honor John Irving for GARP.“ But despite his weariness with middling fiction (with, more and more, fiction in general), Cheever valued the good opinion of his peers and was mindful of their common predicament—so much so, indeed, that he could scarcely read an acquaintance's book without pausing every so often to “try and compose an observation that will be tru
thful and encouraging.” After finishing The Professor of Desire (1977), for example, he wrote Philip Roth as follows: “[In 1959] I first read a paragraph or two of yours and came into the house shouting to Mary that Roth—whoever he was—had the most compelling voice I had encountered in years. I don't mean style; I mean voice—something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head …” Roth was so impressed with the compliment that he attributed it, almost word for word, to E. I. Lonoff—the revered mentor of Nathan Zuckerman—in his subsequent novel The Ghost Writer (1979).

  As one might have guessed, Cheever's celebrity did not have an ameliorative effect on his marriage. Some thought Mary got tired of (among other things) the frequent press attention—the photographers coming out to Ossining to take pictures of her husband splitting wood or sitting on top of a (rented) horse, the better to bolster his image as a Westchester squire. Then, too, Cheever was hardly averse to reminding her that the world, at least, seemed to love him. Even academics were beginning to churn out the odd monograph. As Cheever recorded, “A book comes, of which I'm the subject, and Mary says, ‘People write those books for practically nothing.’ “ She also seemed rather deflating on the subject of Cheever's relative wealth. When he mentioned that he would bank half a million dollars before taxes that year, she suggested they sit down at the kitchen table and discuss giving the money away to a worthy cause (“We have never sat at the kitchen table,” he mused, “she hasn't spoken to me for weeks”). He was nothing if not generous when he was flush: one of his first major purchases with the Stories windfall was a Blackglama mink for his wife—she picked it out at Bonwit's that October—though by Thanksgiving the goodwill had already evaporated. The Thaws came for the feast that year (along with Philip Schultz), and were struck by an almost paralyzing tension in the air. When Cheever said grace, Clare recalled, he muttered “on and on”: “maybe [because] he could talk and didn't have to get down to the tension of sitting and eating. We got through it.”