Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  SUSAN HAD BECOME PREGNANT the previous summer, and she and Calvin Tomkins were married a few months later in the library at Cedar Lane (“It was Tad who suggested that a shot gun might be in order,” Cheever wrote Federico, “but if I bring out the old 16-guage [sic] I might be arrested for the possession of an unliscened [sic] firearm”). As for Ben, he'd been dating the New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, and the two had planned to marry the following June or July; when Ben's father was given six months to live, however, they moved the ceremony to Christmas Eve, 1981. Cheever was delighted by the match, and proved a jolly guest at the wedding (also held in the library), despite his frailty. When the justice of the peace was tardy, Cheever recruited one of the guests, Tony Oursler, to officiate—since, said Cheever, the man's father (Fulton) had written The Greatest Story Ever Told, and hence Tony was the closest thing to a clergyman they were likely to find. As the last vows were spoken, the justice of the peace breathlessly arrived, and the couple were married once more.

  Whatever its constraints, Cheever's relationship with his older son had become steady and amiable. Ben had persuaded his father to let Reader's Digest reprint a few of his old stories (some in condensed form), and Cheever also contributed an essay to the magazine, “Signs of Hope,” a rather ponderous homage to his son's long-distance running. “For years, lovers seemed to me to be proof that the world would go on,” the piece begins. “Now marathon runners, gathering by thousands in cities all over the world to pursue the horizons of fatigue and self-esteem, contribute equally to hopefulness.” Cheever had shown the typescript to Tom Smallwood during his February visit, and the young man had permitted himself a quibble or two about this or that line. Cheever erupted: “I was only trying to do something for a place which has gainfully employed my eldest son!” Once he'd calmed down a bit, Cheever fretfully admitted that he was afraid the essay would be the last thing he ever published, as indeed it was.*

  Finally, on Valentine's Day, Federico was wed to Mary McNeil in Riverside, California. Only a few weeks before, Cheever had hopefully booked himself an airplane ticket, but when the time came he was simply too ill. “Now this morning Mary and Iole have been driven by Max to take a plane for Fred's California wedding,” he noted. “Mary's eyes fill with tears and there is a potential for a tearful scene but we force beyond this.” It was a terrible blow, but otherwise the thought of his son gave him nothing but joy: Federico's choice of wife was “highly mature,” Cheever reflected, and he was also thrilled that Federico had chosen a sensible profession, law, rather than pursue a Ph.D. in history (or write fiction, for that matter), as he'd once planned. “You have been a splendid son,” Cheever wrote, by way of farewell.

  * I'd venture to suggest that Gottlieb's advice is reflected only in the book's last three sentences, where the narrator acknowledges some loose ends and decides to let them be: “But, you might ask, whatever became of the true criminals, the villains who had murdered a high-minded environmentalist and seduced, bribed and corrupted the custodians of municipal welfare? Not to prosecute these wretches might seem to incriminate oneself with the guilt of complicity by omission. But that is another tale, and as I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.”

  * In the opening scene, for instance, Cheever had indicated some dogs playing with what appears to be a ball but on closer inspection proves to be a human head. “What are you trying to tell me?” Bogart asked. Cheever thought about it, shrugged, and the scene was cut.

  * A byproduct, perhaps, of Cheever's abandoned novel about “cosmic loneliness.”

  * Name omitted, though the man died in 1996. Unlike Marvin Schulman, he deserves, I think, the posthumous benefit of a doubt.

  * According to a family ledger, Max was paid $4,806 for his services from January to June 1982.

  * Appearing in the May 1982 issue, shortly before Cheever's death.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  {1982}

  CHEEVER DESCRIBED Oh What a Paradise It Seems as an “ecological romance,” in which an old man comes to terms with a sense of his own corruption by purifying a pond that has been rezoned as a garbage dump; thus he succeeds “in loving usefulness,” as Cheever would have it. Searching for purity, Lemuel Sears is searching for nothing less than an idea of home in all its metaphysical grandeur: “Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many … including Sears, but swinging over the black ice [of Beasley's Pond] convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming.” Home, ideally, is a place where one feels loved, safe, at one with creation, and no wonder it proves ephemeral; yet a yearning for at least some simulacrum of home is part of the human predicament, more so for Cheever than most. Having spent the better part of his life in exile—from a beloved brother, a river, a beach, a fragrance of wood smoke and salt marshes, a village where people knew him and his family—Cheever would pursue this illusion, in art as in life, to the day of his death. His fictional surrogates ache for home, and so, in this final novel, the narrator begins and ends with a wish that the reader be, if nothing else, cozy “in bed in an old house on a rainy night.”

  To be estranged from home is to be lonely and frightened, and of course the only remedy is love, the pursuit of which is problematic. “Sears's sexual demands had given him a great deal of pleasure, some embarrassment and a painful suspicion that the polarities in his constitution were acutely incompatible and that the only myth that suited his disposition was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Sears fancies himself akin to Jekyll, on the one hand, because he's a benign, romantic old man “with loads of friends;” but he is also Mr. Hyde, because women, to him, are little more than lovely abstractions—the “sunny side of the street”—whom he can't begin to fathom except through the direct method of knowing as prescribed in the Bible. “You don't understand the first thing about women,” his lover Renée tells him, again and again, though Sears's mystification in her case would seem to be understandable. Renée is unfathomable. As a character she hardly attains two dimensions, much less three: we are given only the faintest idea of her appearance or personality, and she coyly refuses to discuss even her most telling behavior (attending what are evidently AA meetings). Not that Sears is particularly curious about her or any of the other women in his life. After the death of his first wife (the “sainted Amelia”), he “simply accepted” a marriage proposal from Estelle, the “provincial sorceress,” taking on faith her prediction of future happiness despite the barren failure of her previous marriage. (The woman's powers of divination are belied when she doesn't notice the train that wipes her off the face of the earth.) As for Renée Herndon, pretty much the sum of what Sears knows about her is that she's willing to sleep with him despite a thirty-year age difference and scant common interests—until, just as mysteriously, she won't anymore.

  “I've missed you terribly,” [Sears] said. “I'm so hardpacked that I can't eat.” He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to his knees.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, “but I cannot help you.” …

  “I'll get some flowers,” he said. He pulled up and fastened his trousers.

  One suspects Mr. Hyde had a similar approach, but in Sears's case it doesn't work (this time), and the lovely Renée simply vanishes from the book with barely a further word.

  Puzzled and heartbroken, Sears promptly takes up with the elevator operator in Renée's building, Eduardo, next to whom Renée (as a character) is a triumph of nuanced roundness. The reader has caught a fleeting glimpse of Eduardo ten pages before, when he gives Sears a “look of solicitude” that apparently derives from some notion of Renée's vagaries; when the two meet again, Eduardo wordlessly embraces the bereft old man: “The stranger's embrace seemed to comprehend that newfound province of loneliness that had frightened Sears. … The stranger, whose name he hadn't learned, took him downstairs to a small room off the lobby, where he undressed Sears and undressed
himself. Sears's next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.” Sears's consternation is not so much due to the fact that he allowed himself to be seduced by an anonymous elevator operator, but rather because his seducer is, after all, a man: “I've never really had any reason to be anxious about money or friends or position or health,” Sears “politely” explains to Dr. Palmer, the psychiatrist, “but I did enjoy myself with the elevator man and if I should have to declare myself a homosexual it would be the end of my life.” Dr. Palmer informs Sears that he is a “neurotic” who has “invented some ghostly surrogate of a lost school friend or a male relation from [his] early youth.” It transpires, however, that Dr. Palmer's views are hardly disinterested, since he himself is a “homosexual spinster” who has spent much of his life in “vigilant repression” of “random erections” suffered because of the odd comely male. We are therefore left with the impression that Sears's “polite” candor is far less neurotic than the shrink's hapless denial, and when the latter accuses Sears, say, of “construct[ing] a carapace of friendliness,” it seems merely absurd.

  Another aspect of homelessness treated in the novel is the nomadism of modern life, the “converging highways and the gathering whiplike noise of traffic” which conspire to blight the “intrinsic beauty” of the world. Distracted by the mad clamor of it all, Henry and Betsy Logan ruin an idyllic day at the beach by leaving their baby on the shoulder of Route 224—which leads happily, however, to a rare friendship with the baby's savior, Horace Chisholm, who also happens to be the environmentalist Sears has hired to investigate the Beasley's Pond affair. Like Sears, Chisholm seeks in nature a sense of purity—oneness—otherwise lacking in his lonely life: “Nothing waited for him in his apartment. There was no woman, no man, no dog, no cat, and his answering tape would likely be empty and the neighborhood where he lived had become so anonymous and transient that there were no waiters or shopkeepers or bartenders who would greet him.” His new friend Betsy assuages her own suburban loneliness by pushing a cart around the Buy Brite (“a massive store in the shopping mall on the four-digit interstate”), to which she vengefully returns when Horace is murdered by the cabal of gangsters and venal public officials who have turned Beasley's Pond into a garbage dump: “Her cart was empty and in her raincoat pocket she carried a bottle of Teriyaki Sauce to which she had added enough ant poison to kill a family. Pasted to this was a message that said: ‘Stop poisoning Beasley's Pond or I will poison the food in all 28 Buy Brites.’ “

  And so the dumping ends, just like that, and Sears is left with the ecstatic task of restoring his skating pond to purity. What this means in metaphorical terms is neatly spelled out for us: “[Sears] had found some sameness in the search for love and the search for potable water. The clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured his consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination.” This passage appears on page 99, at which point the reader may indeed be wondering what will happen (with only a page remaining) to the criminals who murdered Chisholm and poisoned the pond. For that matter, what of Renée, who has been missing since the middle of the book? And Eduardo? After that curious tryst in the room off the lobby, he and Sears went on to take a cheerful (and for the most part manly) fishing trip together, after which it was implied that Eduardo would return to his wife and Sears to his pond project, never to meet again, yet mutually refreshed by their harmless encounter. And what, finally, is one to make of the revelation (on page 24) that the book's narrator is a personage from the distant future, lying near a mint-scented stream, “concealed with [his] rifle, waiting to assassinate a pretender who is expected to come here, fishing for trout”? Nothing further is made of this, though one might surmise that the future will be more pastoral (and feudal?) than the blighted, nomadic present, or something like that. But never mind—”this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night”—and perhaps Cheever does well to stress the fairy-tale aspect of things. In a fairy tale, elements of conventional narrative can be safely abandoned: women can be bizarrely capricious (whether hot or cold); elevator operators can spontaneously offer release from certain “modes of loneliness” before fading back into blessed anonymity, without a trace of the complicated anguish that so-called real life tends to entail. That said, fairy-tale evasions rarely result in good art.

  The valedictory themes of the novel were inherently poignant, though, and Cheever addressed them with feeling and an undiminished prose style, such that many reviewers were able to praise Oh What a Paradise It Seems with a clear conscience. By the time it was published, in March, Cheever's illness was well known and newspapers were already preparing obituaries. John Leonard, for one, gladly volunteered to write a gentle front-page notice for the Times Book Review: Cheever's “very short and often lovely novel,” he said, was a relief after “the heroin addiction, homosexuality and convenient miracles of ‘Falconer’ [a relief from the heroin addiction anyway]. … Certainly, ‘Oh What a Paradise It Seems’ is minor art, although many of us will never grow up to achieve it.” Similarly, in the daily Times, Anatole Broyard (who'd been invited to the Cheevers’ famous 1969 dinner dance, less than two months after his mixed review of Bullet Park) conceded that he wasn't really “comfortable” with the novel's abrupt ending, but then, as he diffidently pointed out, Cheever was the “most spontaneous” of major American writers and doubtless knew what he was doing (“I gave up some time ago the notion that art was a comfortable affair”). Updike, more aware than most of Cheever's recent suffering, wrote perhaps the most elegant tribute of all for The New Yorker: “The book is too darting, too gaudy in its deployment of artifice and aside, too disarmingly personal in its voice, to be saddled with the label of novel or novella; it is a parable and a tall tale. … [A]ll is fancy, praise, and rue, seamlessly.” “Seamlessly” is a long (if heartfelt) stretch, but the opposite view was taken only by a few marginal cranks. “Though Cheever can still turn a phrase with the best of them,” wrote a reviewer for The Village Voice (also vicious on the subject of Mary's poetry), “Oh What a Paradise It Seems is by any and every standard a bad book, worthy of notice only because he put his name to it. Clumsily lurching back and forth between postmodern and realistic techniques, it botches both.”

  The final verdict was reflected in sales—less than respectable for a writer of Cheever's fame and critical éclat, though not downright disastrous. A rather modest first printing of thirty thousand sold out in a few weeks, perhaps to the mild surprise of Cheever's publisher, as once again a second printing was slow to reach the stores. By then demand had vanished, and there were no further printings. Cheever was not altogether stoical: “That I am not on the best-seller list and that Ann[e] Tyler is* makes me think myself a forgotten creature in the vast cemetery where the living dead of those who have lost their vogue wait out the last, long year of their time on earth. Up yours.”

  AFTER SIX WEEKS OF PLATINUM, Cheever was told that his tumors were shrinking and that he had a “fifty-fifty chance” of survival. He was naturally elated, and could bear a little better the blow of losing his hair. Almost forty years ago his father had written him, “You were bald as billiard ball, for 6 mo[nth]s as a kid—but you caught up later on hair-game—as all the Cheevers—'wear a lot of hair’—till the final curtain.” Cheever had looked forward to the fruits of this inheritance, but one morning in early March he awoke to find most of his hair (only a bit of it gray) on the pillow. Undaunted, he began working again in Ben's room—the best therapy at any time, all the more now that he claimed to be writing stories about cancer survival. Actually, his journal indicates that he was considering a short novel or screenplay (“opening on a slapstick Preston Sturgis tone”) about a space-shuttle evacuation of New York resulting from a nuclear accident. An even more compelling theme, however, was yet another apologia “about the sexual enjoyment and sometimes bewilderment men can find with one another”: “My determination is to make it clear that in the human condition there are discontents, seizures
of loneliness and unease that seem only answered by our homosexual loves.”

  By the end of March, he was more hopeful than ever (“[I] am determined,” he wrote a friend, “to celebrate my 80th birthday by walking to Croton dam”), but a few days later the doctor announced that he was suspending platinum, which Cheever correctly interpreted as an admission that platinum wasn't working. Instead, they gave him shots of “a pollution that is distilled from the Adriatic,” as Cheever put it, and within a few days he assured himself, once again, that he was feeling much better. “Gaunt, limping and with much of his hair gone,” he gave a clowning interview to the local newspaper, remarking that Dick Cavett had just invited him to do another show: “I asked if I could do it in bed. He didn't think that was funny. I said they could roll the bed out on the set. He thought that was even less funny.” A further surge of hope was provided by the birth of his granddaughter, Sarah Liley Cheever Tomkins, on April 12. “I've kicked it,” he told Susan the next morning. “It's over.”