Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Back when Cheever was writing some of the best fiction of the postwar era, a few captious critics chided him for having a sentimental streak: “He does not yet disturb us enough,” said John Aldridge; “a toothless Thurber,” said Irving Howe. It is interesting to imagine what the likes of Aldridge and Howe would have made of The Shady Hill Kidnapping. But Cheever had become a name, and most reviewers (not to mention Cheever himself) were willing to believe there was something more here than meets the eye. Harry F. Waters of Newsweek was bound to admit that certain scenes were “as gooey as a box of Mallomars,” though he discerned “flashes of brilliance” too; the Boston Globe applauded Cheever's teleplay as “bright, funny, accurate, and so damn well written that it makes the scripts for most fiction on television seem about as dramatic as a year-old issue of ‘Plywood and Panel Magazine.’ “ According to the show's producer, Ann Blumenthal, The Shady Hill Kidnapping attracted one of the largest audiences ever for public television.

  On October 30, ten weeks before the broadcast, Cheever had anxiously attended an advance screening for friends and family at the Henry Hudson Hotel on West Fifty-seventh. Mary and Ben mingled with the two hundred or so guests, but were elsewhere when Cheever took his seat in the front row and insisted that Tom Smallwood sit beside him. When the lights went down, he took Tom's hand and squeezed it slightly whenever he heard someone whispering, “It's really rather good, isn't it?” As he wrote in his journal, “I go to the city to see the TV show which is quite successful and which might contribute to my self esteem.”

  NOT LONG AFTER his kidney was removed, Cheever recovered enough strength to take short bicycle rides, but by the end of October he began to weaken again. His three days in New York for the screening party and other publicity (including a photograph session with Richard Avedon for the cover of WNET's magazine, The Dial) had left him not only exhausted but limping badly. Unable to get a cab, Cheever and Max walked many long blocks to Grand Central, and by the time Max helped him onto the train, Cheever could barely stay on his feet. A young woman named Martha Frey recognized Cheever from a reading he'd given at Vassar a few years back, and offered to carry his bag when they arrived at the Croton station. He was in no condition to protest, though he did speak up when she noticed his limp: “I am not at all infirm,” he said. “Every day I bicycle around the block, up to twenty-five miles.”

  No more. As the pain in his leg increased, Cheever consulted with Mutter, who referred him to a chiropractor (oddly enough, given what he knew about Cheever's condition). The chiropractor suggested a traction device, which provided little relief. By Thanksgiving, Cheever was so ill he could hardly eat, and a few days later he reported to Mutter that he'd discovered “a whole new concept of what pain was.” Little wonder: X-rays revealed that the cancer had now metastasized to his left ilium and femur, right ninth rib, and bladder. Schulman was able to burn away the bladder tumors, though he admitted in a postoperative report that they were likely to recur and that “the overall prognosis is, of course, poor.” The day before the operation, Mutter had called Ben and informed him that his father was suffering from “unusually vigorous” bone cancer and would live maybe six months longer. Ben had planned to take his mother to Nicholas Nickleby that night—his father had paid for the tickets—and decided they might as well go; before the play, however, he broke the news to Mary, who afterward spent the “worst night of her life” alone in Susan's apartment. Two days later, she was in Mutter's office when he told Cheever the truth. As Mutter recalled, “It was the only time John wasn't happy, jovial, changing the subject from his own ills. The contrast made it terrible.” Cheever embraced his wife and sat for a few moments “thunderstruck;” then he mentioned that Federico was getting married in California on Valentine's Day: “Will I at least be able to go to his wedding?” Mutter could promise nothing.

  Max was waiting on Cedar Lane when the Cheevers came home, looking pale and lifeless. “The news is very bad,” said Cheever with a little smile. On a number of levels, it was bad for Max too. He'd felt broken in spirit after his long stay in Ossining the previous August, and Cheever, perhaps sensing as much, had given him two thousand dollars for the trip to Utah with his girlfriend. “[Max] does seem to enjoy a dimension of freedom after his trip to the west and I intend to encourage this,” Cheever subsequently observed. “We have had, I feel, a thoroughly enjoyable time together and now the time has come to part.” Max would not have disagreed, but Cheever's increasing decrepitude made him hesitate; still, Max had all but definitely decided to make a clean break when Cheever came home, smiling bravely, and announced he had terminal cancer. “I thought, ‘I can't do this now,’ “ Max remembered. “ ‘I've seen it through this far. However long it takes, I have to stick with it.’ “

  Susan was vacationing in California with Calvin Tomkins when Cheever called to give her the news; he told her that he'd also phoned Federico, who was coming home as soon as possible. “Some parents will do anything to get their kids to come home for Christmas,” he quipped. Susan returned to New York and found her father lying resignedly in bed, waiting to die. She couldn't bear it: “I called Bill [Winternitz] and he told me to get him to Sloan-Kettering, and hurry. I went to Mutter, got the records, and was off to the races. Ray seemed surprised at the suggestion.” Mutter's surprise was not unwarranted: the time for action had arguably passed months ago, even before Marvin Schulman had discovered the deadly malignancy in July 1981. At Sloan-Kettering, however, Cheever's case was picked up “enthusiastically” by a renowned expert on genito-urinary cancer, who seemed to think that an intensive program of chemotherapy and radiation stood a good chance of shrinking Cheever's tumors and possibly saving him. As Bill Winternitz recalled, “John was told by [the oncologist*] that his treatment would fix it: ‘You'll be riding your bike in two weeks.’ I thought that was obnoxious, and I've never felt good about Sloan-Kettering's treatment since then.”

  For much of that snowy winter, Max took a train to Ossining three times a week in order to drive Cheever to Sloan-Kettering at Sixty-eighth and York, where Cheever would doff his navy cashmere coat, tweed suit, gloves, and hat, then put on a gown (“those rags that are mandatory hospital dress”) and go sit with other cancer patients in what he described as “a kind of laundromat,” where he'd listen for hours to “vulgar and banal music” while waiting to have “a bolt of cobalt fired through [his] diseased bones.” The waiting room wasn't altogether dreary, though. Looking around at his fellow sufferers, Cheever felt a powerful sense of solidarity with the “thousands and thousands” who were thus clinging to life, and meanwhile he couldn't help regaling Max with quick little stories about what these strangers were thinking, what their lives were like, on and on (“the guy's mind never rested”). Then at last Cheever's turn would come. “It was brutal,” said Max. “They'd take him down this long corridor, with this strange aquarium lighting, and twenty minutes later he'd come back down the hallway in silhouette, dressed again in his tweed jacket, but just looking fried—lost, disoriented, his hair just [Max fluttered his fingers around his head and made a crackling noise] like he'd been electrocuted.” Around ten o'clock, the two would drive back to Ossining, where Mary always had dinner ready, and Max would either spend the night or take a late train back to Manhattan.

  “While my beloved wife and my good friend set the table for lunch I conclude that I will simply spend the rest of my life under the happy power of drugs,” Cheever wrote after a few weeks of this. “That this is obscenely self-destructive seems a possibility. The pain in my chest is, at this hour, my main occupation.” Cheever wanted desperately to believe what his doctors were telling him, but he suspected he was being a little deceived and that his suffering was pointless. As it was. And yet, for Cheever, it was no small triumph to recover his tenacity and go down fighting, though it made him cranky at times. “Get out! And don't come back!” he shouted at a doctor who'd proposed a lot of bothersome tests (and worn tasteless clothing, or so an observer remembered). “Clare
Thaw called and asked me the same thing,” he said in a seething voice, when Max called to ask how he was doing after a session of chemotherapy. “I told her it was shitty and not to come and see me. I know very few people, Max—besides Clare Thaw—who would call and ask me that.”

  Mostly, though, Cheever was nothing but grateful toward family and friends, who indeed took every pain to comfort him in these final months. “My beloved daughter calls and she is a sort of paradise,” Cheever wrote of a hospital stay in January 1982. “I bask in the many kinds of radiance she seems to bring into the room.” To be sure, it was a little awkward when family visits coincided with visits from Tom or even Max. When the latter realized that he and Susan would be alone together while Cheever endured some lengthy procedure, he cast about for any excuse to flee; likewise, Tom felt a little superfluous when Susan arrived one day, six months pregnant, and found him sitting in the chair nearest her father. “Aren't you going to give your chair to a pregnant woman?” she asked. Cheever tended to be the calm eye at the center of these imbroglios. He insisted that Tom stay, and at other times would gently inform his daughter that he was expecting a lover (gender unspecified). Though he was too frail to “throw backgammon dice,” as he wrote Clare Thaw, his erotic drives withstood even the worst ravages of cancer and its treatment. At home he would hobble into the woods to look at photographs of naked men, and a nurse once entered his hospital room while he and Tom were “stark naked and engorged on top of one another.”

  Cheever himself was “astonished at [his] lewdness”: “That I can be lewd at all is paradoxical in the light of the love I receive these days from the family and one's friends and lovers. The great beauty of this seems in some way to transcend most physical drives and aspirations. It is spiritual.” At best, he attained a kind of golden mean. Determined to be candid and considerate after a fashion, he asked Mary's permission to invite Tom to the house on February 1. The young man kept Cheever company while he answered mail in Ben's old room at the top of the house (“[I] didn't realize how much he talked to himself,” Tom wrote in his journal), after which the two had sex even though Mary was moving around downstairs. When they joined her later, she didn't seem the least annoyed or suspicious. She asked Tom to carry the dying Edgar into the snow so the dog could pee (nobody mentioned the morbid coincidence), and on parting she warmly thanked him for lifting her husband's spirits. Helping Cheever cope was all part of the same benevolent project.

  Perhaps the heaviest burden fell to Max, who in January—with Cheever's encouragement—had tried to find more conventional employment in publishing. Wearing a brand-new Brooks Brothers suit that he'd bought with Cheever's credit card, he walked twenty blocks to the Random House offices (“because all I had in my pocket was a nickel”), only to learn, from Rob Cowley, that the best job he could possibly hope for would be entry-level. That left Max with his work on Cedar Lane, which was more plentiful than ever. In addition to chauffeuring duties, he handled Cheever's business correspondence, serviced his VW Rabbit, ran errands of all kinds, and attended to the usual household chores.* Above all, Cheever depended on his simple physical presence, though he reproached himself for imposing on Max's kindness by asking him to stay overnight—yet again—while knowing full well that Max longed to catch a train but could hardly say no. One night, as Cheever was about to retire, he invited Max to occupy himself by reading a couple of journals. “On the day I left,” Max noted, “he told me the reason for letting me read the journals was to give me some notion of cadence.”

  CHEEVER'S PROGRESS WAS MIXED after the first month of treatment, though he remained determinedly hopeful. The radiation, at least, appeared to be working: he could walk a little better on his left leg, and the burning in his rib cage had decreased somewhat. Over the same period of time, however, he'd lost twenty pounds, and the chemotherapy had done nothing to shrink his tumors. In late January, the oncologist decided to switch Cheever to an experimental treatment of platinum and methotrexate.

  The first dose would require a week in the hospital, and Cheever asked whether this (as well as the radiation) might henceforth be administered at Northern Westchester in Mount Kisco, since the long days of convalescence at Sloan-Kettering made him homesick, and never mind the logistical difficulty. He was therefore referred to the thirty-two-year-old Robert Schneider, who'd recently interned with Cheever's regular oncologist. “I am so pleased to meet you!” Cheever said, springing up from a stretcher (en route to a bone scan) to shake the young man's hand. The two immediately warmed to each other. Schneider was “the only doctor who didn't say it was all right for me to start drinking again,” said Cheever, grateful for such manifest faith in his survival. “To Robert Schneider, with whom I share an uncommon hopefulness,” he inscribed his most cheerful book, The Wapshot Chronicle.

  He needed all the reassurance and friendship he could get. Edgar had also been diagnosed with cancer, and if anything the coughing dog regarded Cheever as a bad omen, rather than vice versa. When her master had come home from his kidney operation the previous summer, Edgar had given up her place at the foot of his bed and gone to sleep in the living room. At length Cheever coaxed her back, and later forced himself to crawl painfully under his car to dislodge her when she'd gotten stuck in the snow. Edgar died, finally, in March. “I don't even have a correspondent to whom I can write letters,” Cheever lamented afterward. For months he'd been writing little notes to people he cared about, most of them long out of touch; the notes tended to say goodbye, in effect, or else (depending on his mood) that he “fully expect[ed] to recover”—at any rate he let his friends know that he was sick and missed them. A year after his death, Shirley Hazzard found such a note (Won't you come see us?) stuck inside a book; she showed it to her husband, Francis Steegmuller, and both were reminded of how they'd meant to visit Cheever but hadn't gotten around to it in time. “We were both so grieved by that,” said Hazzard. “We had quite close feelings, though we didn't see a great deal of each other. John's a person I'll always think quite tenderly of.”

  All too often we are forced to live apart from the people we love most in the world, and this was Cheever's fate to an uncommon degree. His little address book was largely composed of Russian and Bulgarian names—soulmates whose company he'd enjoyed for a few weeks over the course of a lifetime—and one of the first persons he'd called in December, after Mutter had told him the bad news, was a dear friend he hadn't seen in some three years (and rarely before): Saul Bellow. “Since we spoke on the phone I've been thinking incessantly about you,” Bellow wrote him a few days later.

  … What I would like to tell you is this: we didn't spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it's in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better, we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it's this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America that brings us together. … Neither of us had much use for the superficial “given” of social origins. In your origins there were certain advantages; you were too decent to exploit them. … You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially. … Love, Saul

  The feelings ran even deeper—and far darker—in the case of Maxwell, whom Cheever didn't write until the end of January, when he learned that chemotherapy wasn't working. A few months before, he'd had an erotic dream about his old friend (“I pursue Hope and end up with Bill Maxwell”), which perhaps reflected a few salient if subliminal aspects of their curious relationship: “[Bill] tells me that I am a little mad and that this is the only distinction my style enjoys. He reproves me for my sexual promiscuity …” What Cheever finally wrote the man was this: “I have been ill and I wanted to be the one to tell you, I remember so vividly, over
the years, your attention. I am quite beyond visits and flowers but I do distribute The Collected Short Stories among the doctors. They seem in the end to be mostly what I've written—even Honora Wapshot is forgotten—and thank you for your help with them.” Reading this, Maxwell found himself wishing he'd had the grace years ago “to break through the misunderstanding [before it] was too late,” and his reply (and final letter) to Cheever was “written in tears”: “The stories are safe,” he began, assuring Cheever that his work ranked among the finest of Flaubert, Chekhov, Byron, Yeats; as for what Cheever had called Maxwell's help, it had mostly consisted of the simple “rapture” he'd felt on reading each of Cheever's masterpieces for the first time. He then proceeded to more personal matters. “In recent years”—given Cheever's great success—Maxwell had gotten the impression he'd lost his friend forever: “Your note made it clear that this wasn't true, and I am ashamed of having thought it.”