Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  It fell to Selzer to save his life. The surgeon, staying at Pine Garde, was wearing nothing but pajama bottoms when one of the women banged on his door: “Come quick!” she said. “John Cheever is dying!” Selzer ran barefoot through the woods and burst into Hillside Cottage, where he found Cheever “cyanotic-blue … and looking dead;” Selzer gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Cheever started breathing again, and presently (in his pajama bottoms) rode in the ambulance to Saratoga Hospital, where he learned the doctors had gone home for the night. “Get me oxygen, an electrocardiogram, and I want to draw some blood, do some tests,” he ordered a dawdling nurse. “And I want to examine this man. Get me a thalmoscope and a stethoscope and all of that stuff—and shut up!” Finally, when Cheever was “all plugged in and stable” in the ICU, Selzer went back to Yaddo.

  Cheever was sitting up in bed when Selzer returned early the next morning. “I'm not going home,” he said, when Selzer urged him to do so. “I'm here at Yaddo, I'm staying.” When Selzer explained what had happened the night before, and mentioned the mouth-to-mouth part, Cheever became enraged. “What right have you?” he demanded. “That's rape! That's a violation of me!” At length Selzer replied that he was sending Cheever home in an ambulance whether he liked it or not (“I'm not going to have another thing to do with you”), and phoned Mary to let her know as much. “Well that's fine,” she said. “Do that.”

  Back in Westchester, Cheever was thoroughly examined by Dr. Mutter, who found him in surprisingly decent health except for arteriosclerosis and a “Babinski sign”—the big toe going up instead of down when the bottom of the foot is scratched—indicating active swelling of the brain. The doctor told Cheever that he'd been abusing himself for sixty years (“I said that my scrotum hadn't retracted until I was eight and that I had been abusing myself for only fifty-nine years,” Cheever quipped*) and consequently had a certain amount of scar tissue on the brain, an “irritable focus” which had been triggered by too much caffeine (up to a gallon a day of coffee and tea) as well as overexertion, hence a grand-mal seizure. He was advised to cut down on caffeine and take aspirin for his heart.

  “Mr. John is back!” said one of the servants when Cheever arrived to complete his stay at Yaddo. He seemed little changed by his brush with death—tired, certainly, and somewhat embarrassed. “Oh God,” he remarked to Silber, “can you believe Richard helped me?” As for Selzer, he decided to leave now that his tormentor had returned, and late that night, while packing, he heard a knock on the door. “May I come in?” Cheever asked. Selzer went back to packing, and his visitor stepped inside, sat down, and proceeded to speak about his childhood. “Well, John, I'm expected in the Operating Room at eight o'clock this morning,” Selzer said at last. “I'm afraid I must ask you to leave.” Cheever stood up and took a step toward Selzer, staring at him with curious intensity. “Shall I come see you in New Haven?” he asked. “I can't think why,” said Selzer, struck by the notion that Cheever wanted to kiss him. For years he pondered the moment, until he learned of Cheever's bisexuality after his death. “I think, now, that he was attracted to me, and I think to defend himself against that, he abused me,” said Selzer. “I felt guilty, because I thought: ‘Well, I've failed to understand another human being.’ “

  “I'M AFRAID THE SEIZURE jarred my perspective and I've not yet dared look at the [pages] I wrote on the day of my collapse,” Cheever noted. When he finally got around to it, his worst fears were confirmed: not only was his recent work poor—even bizarre—but the whole manuscript was a botch and would have to be done over. And he really didn't feel like it. He missed drinking, especially at night, when he seemed to come face to face with Hemingway's “Nada” (“the utter nothingness that is revealed to an old man”); and then, if he were dying and/or going mad, why bother? Why not drink? “I can laugh, and ask why can't I be a jolly old man who is finished with his work and is free to spend his twilight years on some sun-drenched island, having his asshole tickled with a peacock feather. I think I can't because I think I would resume my career as a drunkard which would be idiotic and obscene. Get to work.”

  There was also the fact that he'd accepted a sizable portion of his half-million-dollar advance, though he wasn't at all sure he could satisfy the contract, whether he felt like it or not. One day he read a novel in one sitting, and was horrified to find that the next day he couldn't remember a single detail. Indeed, the whole world seemed increasingly strange to Cheever, and vice versa. When Litvinov came to the States and visited Cedar Lane, she felt as though she were communicating with her friend “through a veil”: “He hardly talked. Every now and then he'd go somewhere and come and bring some book and put it on the table, then bring another book, like an automaton, rather.” Litvinov related the incident to Maxwell, who sadly observed that she was “describing a deeply disturbed man;” on the lighter side, he mentioned that Newhouse thought Cheever was secretly pleased by his seizures, since he could now liken himself to Dostoevski—not a bad aperçu, as it happened. “Did you know that I suffer from Grand Mal?” Cheever wrote a prospective biographer, James Valhouli. “I think this important since the seizures I've suffered, this late in life, seem allied to some of the insights in the stories.” But privately he wondered, too, whether his condition was meant to reveal the “error in [his] ways”:

  That fucking Max is punishable by death is the censoriousness of my childhood, Freud's revelation in Vienna, Dostoievsky's vision in Leningrad and the expounding of this by a school of sexual misfits. … I have prayed for sexual discretion and reasonableness a thousand times. I have prayed to be able to join the erotic glee that is so truly my sense of being alive with the spiritual guidance that has been my salvation.

  By then he'd suffered a second seizure, on November 30, while playing backgammon with a friend and sometime Friday Clubber, Roger Willson. This time he was in the hospital for two days, and emerged feeling almost desperately weary—”quite old”—even more so now that he was taking the anticonvulsant Dilantin (“It's knocked the shit out of my childlike sense of wonder”). Happily, though, his marriage had shown a vast, practically overnight improvement. Always at her best as a caretaker, Mary found it easier to be loving now that her husband needed her so badly, while he in turn forced himself to be patient whenever she disagreed with him in some tacit or accidental way—by speaking kindly, say, of someone he despised. As he mused with laudable self-awareness, “I am inclined to consider any diversion from my thinking to be quarrelsome and perverse.”

  Thanks to their renewed amity, Cheever was able to face with composure and even pleasure the publication (in December) of The Need for Chocolate and Other Poems, a collection of Mary's work, which of course included what the author considered her finest poem, “Gorgon,” with its lines about “life-denying husbandry” and (which Cheever never did quite forgive) “nicker[ing] at my breasts.” A few months earlier, while the marriage was still on the rocks, Mary had suspected her husband of being mischievous when he presented her with a framed copy of the book jacket: “It was like, ‘Look what she did!’ It wasn't an entirely pure-hearted gesture.” However, when the book was finally published, he was nothing but supportive. He went out of his way to praise her in the press, attended her signing at a local bookstore (“a triumph for her as a poet, a neighbor, a mother, a wife”), and on Valentine's Day presented her with a gold necklace and a little poem: “The need for chocolet is much finer / than the need for gold, / and I have hoped to find you / some of both, / While we have sought the ghost of love / together—and better yet, / Found something more enduring / than either gold or chocolet.”

  * Actually, of course, quite a number of Cheever's students went on to impressive careers—Gurganus, Boyle, Hansen, some Barnard students—though arguably the more notable cases had little to do with Cheever's influence.

  * Getting the math wrong: he was sixty-eight at the time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  {1980-1981}

  THE WORLD SEEMED IN A RUSH t
o honor Cheever. On his return from Yaddo in late October, he'd gone to New York with Ben to receive the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award from the Union League Club. The occasion called for a speech, which Cheever saw as a nice opportunity to declare his place among aesthetic traditionalists (“[I'm] rather like the old Hudson River painters”), while deploring the incoherence and abstraction of so much contemporary art. “I will tell them that our two most conspicuous innovators—Pablo Picasso and James Joyce—never for a moment lost sight of the fact that our bewilderment in this world in which we find ourselves, is finite,” he wrote Max (perhaps pointedly). The speech was a success, though afterward Cheever was confronted by a drunk who'd been offended by Falconer (“You used to be good, but then you started writing smut!”), until Ben stepped between them.

  The laurels continued in spring. That April of 1981, Cheever received the American Book Award for the paperback Stories, and the following month he returned to Saratoga for an honorary degree from Skidmore. Standing on the dais, accepting the congratulations of his old friends the Palamountains, Cheever couldn't help but wonder at “the abyss between [his] public and [his] otherwise person.” The abyss was more on his mind than ever, now that people were writing books about him. He'd kept warmly in touch with James Valhouli ever since 1971, when the young man had begun researching his dissertation on Cheever at the University of Wisconsin. But now that Valhouli had proposed a biography, he found Cheever's manner a little “offish”: there were days when Cheever seemed inclined to let Valhouli see a journal or two, other days when he thought not; sometimes he'd answer a question with candor and precision, other times he'd feign deafness and tell some irrelevant story. Finally Valhouli committed the fatal blunder: “He speaks of Coates’ paper in which I am a tubercular, effeminate, solitary lover of men,” Cheever wrote. “This story seems not worth telling.” And yet the story would be told, in some form or another, and Cheever did his best to defuse the matter with evasion, bluster, or (especially) charm. When George Hunt—a sympathetic Jesuit from Le Moyne College in Syracuse—began writing a work of criticism that would touch, here and there, on the subject's life, Cheever lost no time addressing the issue of his “erotic adventures” with an affable note: “These seem never to have enjoyed any perspective in the dissertations I have read. I would not dream of challenging the authority of Venus but I have always felt that the tenderness and ardor that men and women often feel for their own kind is quite blameless.”

  His longing to escape meanwhile—from the responsibilities of work, the consequences of fame, and sometimes life itself—informed his last contribution to The New Yorker, a one-page set piece titled “The Island,” which evoked a final, paradisal destination for bygone personages of every sort: “Here they all were—the greatest trombonist, the movie queen, the ballplayers, trapeze artists, and sexual virtuosos of yesterday—leading happy and simple lives … trapping shellfish, weaving baskets, and reading the classics.” And with them, in spirit anyway, was one of the greatest writers: Prospero putting his wand away. Almost fifty years ago, Cheever had broken into the magazine with a modest sketch, and he was leaving that way, too, having descended, as it were, to the foot of a mountain. The editors realized they were getting “the last squeezings from the press,” as McGrath put it, but were simply happy that Cheever had come back at the end. Or nearly the end: slowly—dutifully—he plugged away at his novel, which he now thought of calling Work for the Night Is Coming, or simply Swan Song.

  A couple of weeks before “The Island” appeared in the April 27 issue, Cheever noticed that his beloved old dog, Edgar, was becoming very ill, and a few days later his own health took an abrupt turn for the worse. Finding it almost impossible to urinate, and passing blood when he did, Cheever was admitted to the hospital on April 17 “in acute distress.” At first it didn't seem terribly serious: his prostate was enlarged again, and the bleeding was attributed to incipient kidney stones (“I had been hoping for some restraint on my erotic ardor and this seemed to serve,” Cheever noted). However, when lab reports showed “irregularities” in his urine, Cheever was referred to a Phelps urologist named Marvin Schulman, who relieved the patient's immediate distress with a procedure that must have been intensely painful: a catheter with a spring-loaded blade was inserted into Cheever's ureter and then withdrawn, slicing through scar tissue and thus relieving the obstruction. “I felt like a Calla Liley [sic] with my stamen in the Waring Mixer,” Cheever wrote Federico. Once he'd healed a little, though, he felt a certain gratitude toward the urologist; also, he might have figured that—given what had passed between them—it would be wise to endear himself: “[T]hank you for having cleared up my plumbing and for having left the relationship open-ended,” he wrote Schulman that summer. “It is a pleasure to know that while my urinary tract has an understanding friend in Ossining, so also does the rest of me. In August I am one of those men who can be seen eating their fried potatoes alone in the Brasserie Suisse and I will call to see if you might join me.”

  Soon Cheever's pain and bleeding resumed, worse than ever, though he was determined to keep his good humor (“I take this all as a big joke since there really isn't anything else to be done”). At the beginning of July, Updike and his second wife came to Cedar Lane for lunch, and while Cheever had no appetite and looked “yellowish,” he was a convivial host and even insisted on showing his guests the Croton Dam, where Updike's wife took a picture of the two writers. Looking at the photograph afterward, Updike was struck by how “visibly in pain” Cheever seemed: “Yet such was his vitality, and the dazzling veil of verbal fun he spun around himself,* that only the photograph made me realize how bravely ill he was that day.” He was, in fact, only days away from a major crisis. On July 8, Cheever suffered another seizure and was rushed to the Phelps emergency room, where X-rays revealed a walnut-sized tumor on his right kidney. On July 14, the kidney was removed by Dr. Schulman, who declared the operation a success. As Cheever wrote in his journal, “I am told by the surgeon that the malignity of my cancer was far from fatal and that the cancer was defenestrated very early in its career.” Ben also spoke with the surgeon, and was also told that all would be well.

  So Schulman might have thought at the time. Two days later, a pathology lab report indicated “transitional cell carcinoma,” a generally low-grade malignancy that tends to be treated with electrodesiccation, in which recurring bits of cancerous tissue are burned away with electric current. In other words, the report was relatively good news. That same day, however—-July 16—a second report was submitted to Dr. Schulman, indicating the presence of a deadly, “poorly differentiated” hypernephroma (common to heavy smokers) that spreads rapidly and requires immediate attention. Schulman sent both reports to Dr. Mutter, stapling a little note to the second one: “Attached is the revised report on John Cheever. Please destroy previous report and replace it with this one. Thank you.”

  Meanwhile Schulman stuck to the story offered by the first report (which incidentally remained in the file). “I returned from the hospital only yesterday morning and feel exactly like a man who has risen from the dead,” Cheever wrote Art Spear on July 22. “Indeed, according to Dr. Schulman, that is what I am.” And what of Cheever's longtime physician and friend, Ray Mutter? He, too, was in possession of the dire facts, and would eventually—four months later—be the one to break the news. However, back in July, Mutter simply assumed that Schulman was maintaining a postoperative follow-up, which naturally would have entailed discussing the prognosis and treatment options. “To begin with,” Mutter explained, “this is a very complicated tumor and you needed a urologist to try to interpret it. Technically, it's a very difficult problem, and I'm sure that Schulman ducked it. He ducked telling John about it and he should have told John about it. It's shocking to me, too. I'm struggling with this because I'm sitting here thinking, ‘Where did the ball drop between July and December?’” When it finally came to light that Schulman had been less than candid, various family members (including Bill
Winternitz, a physician) had urged Mary to sue, but by then her husband was dead and she wanted to put the matter behind her. When asked many years later what she thought of Marvin Schulman, Mary said: “I hated him! He was one of those yucky people up to no good. He was making much of his association with Cheever, because he thought it reflected on his own importance.” Then, ruefully, she added, “John liked people who played up to him.” Indeed, Schulman and Cheever cultivated a friendship of sorts (as we shall see), which might have been jeopardized if the urologist had told his patient frankly that he had less than a year to live. And if things were hopeless anyway, why not enjoy the friendship while it lasted?*

  On some level, anyway, Cheever knew he was dying—whatever Schulman might say about little cauterizable bladder tumors—and he became severely depressed. “I conclude that these are the last weeks or months of my life,” he wrote a few days after leaving the hospital, though he couldn't quite bring himself to confess the extent of his despair. He didn't want to burden his family, for any number of reasons—because he loved them, certainly, and because he'd spent a lifetime filtering a lot of unspeakable feelings through a façade of formality and laughter. (“I still feel very frail from the defenestration of my kidney and the loss has left me quite sentimental,” he wrote Federico on July 24. “I sometimes cry when Edgar brings me a tennis ball.”) Essentially alone with his misery, Cheever began hoarding pills in the drawer of his bedside table, until one day he blurted out that he was “frightened” while lunching with Don Ettlinger: “I wake up at night and I'm calling out ‘Daddy, Daddy, help me,’ and I've never called anybody Daddy in my whole life.” He also told Ettlinger about the pills, which helped; afterward the thought of suicide began to seem “less important,” and he decided to see a psychiatrist.