by John Cheever
Certain paternal duties proved too much for Cheever, however. One day Ben, fifteen, managed to get his penis stuck in a zipper, and nothing his father could devise would extricate him. Amid general chaos at the house on Cedar Lane, the boy finally freed himself. As the years wore on, the pattern of dependency was reversed, and Ben found he could sometimes be of service to his father, a man brilliant in his art and physically tough, yet barely competent to deal with some of the simplest problems of daily life. On a ski trip with his father and Alwyn Lee, for instance, the teenager showed Cheever how to turn on the tap water in the railway sleeping car. “Isn’t it wonderful that I have this son who can figure things out for me?” his father said. He had a way of making people feel needed, and of presenting himself as the one in need. “Don’t you wish I was different?” he sometimes asked Ben. “Don’t you wish I didn’t drink?” Eager to please, Ben invariably said no, that was all right, whatever his father did was fine with him.
It was different with Federico, called Picci as a lad and then simply Fred. Fred was the apple of his father’s eye, and he could say what he pleased. One of his earliest memories is of sitting in his father’s lap at dusk, watching the blackbirds wheel by on their way to the Hudson to feed on insects. Whenever harm threatened the boy, John was terrified for him. When the boy came down with a fever, his father spent the night on the floor of his room. When Cheever spilled both his son and himself in a bicycle accident in Nantucket, the damage was minor but both were traumatized. Fred was well along into adolescence before he learned to ride a bike. As he grew older, though, Fred asserted himself with his father. In the corner of the downstairs living room-dining room at Cedar Lane there is a wooden chair. “That chair was broken twice,” Mary said, “when Fred hit his father in it.” It was not that they were enemies, not that at all. Fred loved his father very much and could hardly have felt closer to him. But he was frustrated and angered by his father’s refusal to take control of himself. And he was in the house for the worst of it, after his older siblings were packed off to prep school and college.
In addition to liquor, Cheever was victimized by phobias. The worst of these was his fear of bridges, a fear that for many years kept him from crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge to visit such old friends as Eddie Newhouse and Don Ettlinger in Rockland County. In his 1961 “The Angel of the Bridge,” this phobia is associated with a more general condemnation of the ills of modernity: freeways and monotonous housing developments and continuous piped-in music. “It was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge,” the narrator reveals, “that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world.” But what could he do? Go back to St. Botolphs, sit around in a Norfolk jacket, and play cribbage in the firehouse? Instead he goes on as best he can until one day, on the Tappan Zee, he picks up a young girl hitchhiker who fetches a small harp from a waterproof case and sings him across the bridge and into “blue-sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, an ecstatic sereneness” with the folk song “I Gave My Love a Cherry That Had No Stone.”
No such miraculous cure rid Cheever of his phobia. In his fiction he repeatedly attempted to construct bridges between the grotesque real world and the potentially unifying universe of his dreams. In “A Vision of the World” (1962), he explores this obsessive compulsion to forge a link between the two worlds. The troubled protagonist beholds a beautiful woman standing in a field of wheat, wearing the clothes his grandmother might have worn. Like the chimera in the backyard and the folksinger on the bridge, she is an apparition, surely, and yet she seems “more real than the Tamiami Trail four miles to the east, with its Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands.” The woman speaks an incomprehensible language, then the rain on the roof wakes the narrator from his dream, and as the healing waters descend he sits up in bed and exclaims to himself, “Valor! Love! Beauty! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!” The words take on the colors of the earth, and his hopefulness mounts until the litany, together with the vision, render him “contented and at peace with the night.”
Happy endings or not, stories like these confessed to Cheever’s deepening dissatisfaction with modern life: its pervasive materialism and weakening ethical standards, its standardized and cheapened mass culture, above all its excessive mobility and rootlessness. No angel appeared to halt his addiction to alcohol, cure his phobias, ameliorate his self-disgust. To some degree, he transferred the self-criticism that cropped up regularly in his journals to a fictional condemnation of contemporary existence in its ugliest manifestations. Throughout 1962 and much of 1963 he was working on The Wapshot Scandal, his darkest book and the one in which he most vigorously excoriates the world he inhabits. Writing the novel only intensified his depression. “I can’t ever recall having been so discouraged and melancholy,” he observed in September 1962, and this “absurd melancholy” persisted up to and beyond publication of the novel in January 1964.
This depression was so powerful as to lead him to the brink of suicide. “After the Scandal,” as he told Lehmann-Haupt, “I was really in trouble, really suicidal.” Despairing, he got up in the night, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and chain-smoked into the early hours. Then in his fitful sleep he dreamed he heard Hemingway saying, “This is the small agony. The great agony comes later.” He disposed of all the shotgun shells and tried to sweat out his malaise by scything the woods. Then, still seeking equanimity, he flew off to Rome for two weeks alone. The family, he felt sure, was happy to see him go.
Cheever’s lingering despondency was the more ominous in the light of the novel’s success. The Wapshot Scandal, generally well reviewed, sold over thirty thousand copies in the first two months. Earlier in life, when his cafard (or cockroach) visited him, there was almost always an assignable reason. The dark eminence would surely go away, he thought, if he made some money, if he finished the novel, if he had a house of his own to live in, if he won the award. It was worse when all these things came to pass and the depression hung on, stronger than ever. What did he want? Was there anything that could banish his cafard?
Though The Wapshot Scandal is a sequel to The Wapshot Chronicle and deals with the same characters, it is in tone a very different book. As George Garrett put it, “the sins of Chronicle are original sin. Scandal moves inexorably toward the end of the world.” The difference is nowhere more striking than in the almost total absence, in the later novel, of those “odors of the world, the flesh and the devil” that proliferated in the earlier one. Love has also disappeared, or almost so, giving way to lust. Melissa Wapshot, obsessively conscious of her mortality, seduces Emile the grocery boy and takes him off to live in carnality and unhappiness in Rome. Moses, devastated, resorts to drink and casual fornication. Dr. Cameron, Coverly’s boss at the missile center, contemplates apocalyptic explosions without flinching, but he has treated his own son monstrously and can only feel the chill go off his bones in the arms of his high-priced Italian prostitute. Cousin Honora also finds her way to Italy in an escape from the Internal Revenue Service, to which she has never paid a penny in taxes. She comes home to St. Botolphs to die, however. It is where she belongs, but it is not what it used to be.
Faith is fading even in St. Botolphs. As the Chronicle begins and ends on Independence Day, two Christmases in the old town frame the Scandal. At the beginning, Mr. Applegate, the rector of Christ Church, receives a delegation of carolers in his home. He has been troubled by religious doubt, but as the carolers sing he “felt his faith renewed, felt that an infinity of unrealized possibilities lay ahead of them, a tremendous richness of peace, a renaissance without brigands, an ecstasy of light and color, a kingdom! Or was this gin?” For Mr. Applegate drinks. In fact, he is quite drunk while delivering the Mass on Christmas Eve to a congregation of four (Coverly included). In a burst of rhetoric he presents much of the novel’s message.
“Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on
thruways, expressways, freeways and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane-landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the day that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths.… Let us pray for the lecherous and the impure.…”
At this point, the other worshipers leave and Coverly is alone with Mr. Applegate to his amen.
Cheever does not end his novel there, but follows Coverly as he goes back to the Viaduct House to liberate brother Moses from the grip of Dionysus and the arms of the lascivious widow Wilston. The next day, following cousin Honora’s old custom, Coverly and Betsey serve Christmas dinner to residents of the Hutchins Institute for the Blind. Once more Leander has the last word, in the form of a scrap of paper found in his wallet after he drowned: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.” The sentiment is reassuring—it was one Cheever often recited—but it can hardly justify the wider universe of the novel, where evil so consistently predominates over good.
One reviever of Scandal thought the author’s epiphanies too facile, another noted inconsistencies in character and tone, and as with Chronicle there were reservations about the seemingly haphazard structure. What Cheever was after was a structural pattern that suited his own fragmented times. Linear narrative no longer made sense in a world “distinguished by its curvatures.” Conventional narrative was designed “to express a sense of consecutiveness,” but he did not regard life that way. So he reached out for something new. The Wapshot Scandal, he once said, “was an extraordinarily complex book built around non sequiturs.” And in his notes for the novel, “I think of the book as a collection of forlornities.… I think of the book as a painting, there is the opening, the overture and then the eye moves from the snow storm to [Coverly’s missile base] Talifer. From Talifer to [the suburb where Moses and Melissa live] Proxmire. The Chronicle was all thrust and this is very different. This is your world and I have come to tell you so; I am your prophet.” If a prophet, then a Jeremiah with a warning not to be ignored.
In The Wapshot Scandal Cheever set out to paint nothing less than a terrifying picture of the times. “I look for a simple world,” he commented in his notes,
and I seldom find it. I look for resolute and homely faces, good health and the authority of decision, for wit, vitality and good cheer, but instead I find timidity, the half-formed and sometimes the malformed, suspiciousness, cupidity, and lust. And so I think I see here in these crowds, and in my heart the deep confusions of my nation and my time.
For some time he had integrated dream and reality in his fiction, and now dream turned to nightmare. In his spare time Coverly feeds the poems of Keats into a computer to discover the frequency of word use, and to his amazement (and in defiance of all mathematical logic) the words come out in a comprehensible verse of subterranean darkness:
Silence blendeth grief’s awakened fall
The golden realms of death take all
Love’s bitterness exceeds its grace
That bestial scar on the angelic face
Marks heaven with gall.
“It is as if Marquand had suddenly been crossed with Kafka,” a surprised reviewer wrote. The surprise was not really justified, for it was past time for readers to recognize that Cheever’s writing constituted “something unique in contemporary fiction,” completely outside the New Yorker pattern or any other. “The terrible vision you have is of our daily lives in their emotional squalor and incongruity,” Cowley wrote him after reading the novel in galleys. “You’re getting angrier and angrier.”
As the book was coming off the press in December 1963, the simmering antagonism between Cheever and The New Yorker came to a boil. The Christmas holidays with their annual financial burden tended to trigger the author’s resentment about the prices paid for his fiction. Besides, he felt himself in a strong bargaining position. He’d completed his novel, Time was doing a cover story on him, and he had just submitted his magnificent story “The Swimmer” to the magazine. So he went down to New York and asked Maxwell for a raise. Maxwell did not have the power to give him one, and explained that he was already getting the highest fiction rate. A disgruntled Cheever went downstairs to a pay phone and called Candida Donadio, who was not then his agent but was overjoyed to hear from him, and asked if she could do better. A few minutes later Donadio called back. The Saturday Evening Post, which had recently lured John O’Hara away on a similar basis, was prepared to offer him twenty-four thousand dollars for a first-look contract and four stories a year.
This was about five times what The New Yorker was then paying him, so Maxwell and editor William Shawn could hardly match that in their counteroffer. “A key to the men’s room and all the bread and cheese I could eat,” John Cheever characterized it. He reached an agreement with the magazine, nonetheless. He promised to give The New Yorker a first look at his stories in return for his usual rate on acceptance and a tacit understanding that if he wanted to submit any of his fiction elsewhere, the editors would look the other way. On this basis the relationship staggered on, though in the years ahead Cheever was to publish twice as many stories in other magazines, including the Post, Esquire, and Playboy, as he did in The New Yorker. Of his 121 stories in the magazine, 5 appeared in 1964, and only 6 more during the remaining seventeen years of his life.
RUSSIA
1964
1964 was in almost every respect an extremely important year in Cheever’s life. He published not one but two books: The Wapshot Scandal in January and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow in October. In March he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, for the first time emerging as a public figure. The surge of accomplishment carried him on trips to Italy and Hollywood and Russia. In Hollywood he met and fell half in love with actress Hope Lange. In Russia he got to know John Updike and conceived an admiration for a people who—it seemed to him—valued their artists far more than most Americans.
The Time cover story acquainted Cheever with some of the costs of fame. To begin with, he resisted the idea. “I don’t want the story,” he said. “We didn’t ask,” the Time people said. Still the project might have foundered except for the involvement of Time-Life editor Alwyn Lee, a gregarious and witty Australian who was one of Cheever’s closest friends and drinking companions. Cheever felt he could trust Lee, but he was not prepared for the persistence of the magazine’s editors, researchers, and photographers. With characteristic Yankee diffidence, he refused to unburden himself on intimate matters. His technique with interviewers, during those years, was to try to get them drunk, or failing that, to involve them in some form of exercise that made question-asking and note-taking virtually impossible. “Cheever doesn’t really like to talk about himself but about other people,” Time correspondent Andrew Kopkind reported. “When I would say, ‘Now we really must talk about you,’ he would leap up and say something like ‘Let’s go tobogganing.’” In fact, Lee and another Time staffer did accompany Cheever and his son Ben on a ski trip to Stowe, where they followed him around the trails. Meanwhile, another editor had been at work “asking indecent questions” in Ossining. Altogether it was far from a pleasant experience.
Faced with Cheever’s uncommunicativeness, the magazine’s reporters widened their contacts with family, friends, neighbors—anyone who could claim acquaintance with the author. They promised to leave his brother, Fred, alone, something Cheever insisted upon, and then broke the promise. Clearly, everyone was fair game. One reporter came to see the Robert Penn Warrens in Connecticut. “I remember that son of a bitch,” Warren said. “He was after smut.” Another tracked down Fax Ogden in Delaware. “What have you done wrong?” Ogden inquired of Cheever by telephone. “Someone from Time magazine is coming to ask questions about you in half an hour.”
The legman in Westchester concentrated on Cheever’s drinki
ng and sex life. One neighbor was fairly bursting with gossip when—as she thought—this Time man finally came to call. She started in immediately with tales of martinis at noon, nude swimming, and other morally reprehensible behavior. When she paused for breath, the man said, “Lady, I’m your Fuller Brush representative.” Or so, at least, Cheever claimed in reconstructing the story.
It was not only shyness that made him distrust public recognition. He felt strongly that it was wrong to court publicity, and tried as far as possible to avoid the appearance of calling attention to himself. As Lee noted in the Time story, he was “not a writer with a public personality to flourish and exploit, such as Hemingway or Norman Mailer.” The story’s strongest emphasis fell on Cheever as a kind of latter-day moralist who envisioned the individual “at the center of a system of obligations.” Let them neglect these obligations, and his characters might find themselves punished by a black-magical metamorphosis into some creature or object less than human. Cheever would have denied the designation of moralist—he passed judgment on no one, he liked to believe—but certainly his fiction is full of the struggle to build and then obliterate boundaries, and those who try to escape are sometimes consigned to a modern variation of the inferno. The best thing about Lee’s story, working with bits and pieces as they trickled in from Time staffers, was that it derived from his own intimate acquaintance with John and Mary Cheever. He portrayed them as likable and talented human beings, as complementary yet very different people. “Ovid in Ossining,” as the cover story was entitled in an unhappy burst of alliteration, was much better than it might have been.
