Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  At subsequent meetings the subject of homosexuality cropped up repeatedly. Walking down Fifth Avenue, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to look at men’s or women’s behinds, Cheever said. He confessed to a homosexual encounter the previous December in Ossining. He talked at length about Hope Lange as well, making claims about their sex life that Silverberg interpreted as a defense against homosexual desires. Throughout, Cheever kept trying to put the doctor-patient association on a more personal basis. He even proposed that the Silverbergs come to dinner. As with Dr. Hays, he set out to entertain his psychiatrist. He was all charm, entirely ingratiating, and less than forthcoming. He liked to talk about himself if he’d had a drink or two, Silverberg thought, but not necessarily to reveal himself. Given Librium during one session, he would discuss nothing except the party he and Mary had given for 150 people in honor of Rob and Susie. Cheever drank too much on that occasion, and Iole kept summoning Mary to help. “Signora, you must come. Mr. Cheever no good.”

  Drink, depression, and bad temper also led to unpleasant relations between Cheever and his son Ben, who was about to be married. John spent much of his time with Fred, a boy who in preadolescence resembled his father at the same age—considerably overweight, not especially athletic, and extremely bright. Cheever was “a very good father,” Fred thought at twelve, “but he lives in a world of his own.” Fifteen years later, as a law student at UCLA, Fred elaborated on the point. As a writer his father “made his own world in relative isolation from most of his kind.… No one, absolutely no one, shared his life with him.”

  That was not quite what Silverberg concluded. His patient, he thought, was basically a childlike man, enclosed within himself and unable to give freely to others. In his egocentrism, love of self and hatred of self were inextricably intertwined. Cheever thought terrible things about himself, and accused himself at length, but did little to modify his behavior. The psychiatrist came to think of him as “this genius character who bedeviled everyone around him.”

  Cheever resisted treatment with Dr. Silverberg as he had with Dr. Hays. “I have a wonderful time,” he told the Dirkses. “I’ve never told him the truth once.” Some years later, he was interviewed for Westchester magazine by a woman who asked why he so disparaged psychiatrists in his fiction. In replying, he ventured the opinion that astrology was probably more therapeutic than psychiatry. Only then did he discover that the interviewer was Dr. Silverberg’s wife.

  BOTTOMING

  1969–1973

  The world turned dark for Cheever as he approached his sixties. The light in the sky did not cheer, the rain did not heal. His depressions and phobias grew worse. His marriage turned bitter. He could write little or nothing. There were times when he considered suicide.

  Liquor lay near the heart of these problems. The etiology of alcoholism is a subject of dispute, but recent research suggests what was manifestly the case for John Cheever: that drink was more the cause of his malaise than its consequence. One night’s alcoholic euphoria led to the next morning’s despair, in an intensifying cycle of repetition. Ever greater quantities were required to purchase the daily oblivion. Rob Cowley, stopping over to play backgammon with his father-in-law, joined his host in a full glass of whiskey, with no water and a few ice cubes—and then joined him in another. When Rob got home, he fell downstairs and passed out. His two young daughters thought it was wonderful. “Look,” they said, “Daddy’s playing a game.” But he played the game only rarely. Cheever played it every day, and through habituation could consume large amounts without showing the effects. When he and John Dirks took the same train into New York for David Boyer’s twenty-first-birthday bachelor party, Cheever insisted that they stop at the Century Club for two large goblet martinis. After those and subsequent drinks at the party, Dirks was unable to get through dinner and give the customary toast. Cheever performed as expected. Yet he went beyond even his own extensive capacities at times. He showed up at the wedding of Leonard Field’s daughter mumbling and incoherent. On his own, around the house, he regularly drank so much that his speech was often slurred. At his worst, he succumbed to incontinence. When the Cheevers invited guests to their house, say, for Sunday lunch, Mary served only a glass of sherry or two.

  By the spring of 1971, he was troubled enough by the way drinking affected his writing to consult his old adviser Malcolm Cowley about it. He wasn’t getting much work done, he reported. His “seizures of temporary insanity”—three-day bursts that drove him to the typewriter to produce stories—were occurring much less frequently than in the past. The trouble, he thought, was twofold. He drank too much and he’d written too much. In reply, Cowley assured him that slowing down was to be expected as part of aging. “You can’t write twenty stories a year any longer, but patience takes the place of that early jism—you can write four or five and they can be damned good ones.” But Cheever was not writing four or five stories a year, or close to it. He published one story in 1970, none in 1971, two in 1972, one in 1973. Nor was he working on a novel. Bullet Park signaled the end of “a method, a cadence and a perspective,” and he had not yet found the new voice and the new subject matter he was seeking.

  As for alcohol, Cowley recommended that Cheever follow his own regimen of “one big slug of bourbon” at sundown each day. He also observed, sensibly, that “nobody in God’s world” was going to help him or beseech him to stop drinking. “It’s completely up to you—and isn’t that a relief? A focusing of responsibility?”

  Two months later, the Cheevers attended a dinner party at the Cowleys’ in Sherman, Connecticut. On the way home John was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Somers, New York. According to Mary, John was a good driver even when mildly drunk, and never had a serious accident. On this occasion, he was stopped late at night for driving suspiciously slowly and irregularly on Route 100. He smelled to heaven of liquor, but argued indignantly with the state police. “Put me in jail,” he demanded. “If it’s a crime to drive carefully, put me in jail.” That was not what they had in mind. He was fined seventy-five dollars and his license was suspended for sixty days. Later that summer, still without a license, Cheever rode down from Yaddo with Curtis Harnack and Hortense Calisher. During the trip he produced a flask, took a healthy swig, and to Calisher’s surprise made no offer to pass it around. This seemed so unlike Cheever, with his keen sense of ceremony and doing the right thing, that it occurred to her for the first time that he must be under the mastery of alcohol.

  At parties generally—“I love parties,” Cheever said in his 1969 New York interview—he was almost always gay, with a lively sense of the absurd and a vibrant receptivity to humor. John Hersey, who saw him both drunk and sober, thought him much the same either way: a man of “remarkable speed and sunny disposition who was enjoying himself almost beyond belief.” He seemed so much the soul of gaiety that Hersey found it hard to imagine the pain he must have been going through. Shirley Hazzard, who with her husband, Francis Steegmuller, saw the Cheevers at the Warrens’ annual Christmas party and a few times at dinner parties, thought his persistent jollity a defense against despondency. Moments of authentic contact dissolved in a flow of jocularity that Hazzard saw as Cheever’s repudiation of any close approach to his private—and, by then, clearly suffering—self. “We always had pleasant exchanges—about writing, about books, about life, and about Italy,” she recalls, “but even these became repetitious, as if the same anecdotes represented a safe haven and any fresh considerations would be disruptive.”

  Cheever was in fact actively contemplating suicide. “I felt my life and career were over,” he said later. “I wanted to end it.” Liquor served him toward that end. In the summer of 1972, when Mary Cheever was in New Hampshire at Treetops and John Dirks vacationing in Maine, Cheever used to stop by Mary Dirks’s house at cocktail hour. He refused, he told her, “to be the lonely man eating in a Chinese restaurant.” Besides, Mary Dirks gave him an intelligent, attractive audience and plenty to drink. One evening on the terrace,
Cheever drunkenly fell and gashed his head on a metal table. Mary picked him up, took him inside, and fed him a spaghetti dinner that sobered him up. Often he felt bereft. Once, after Friday Club, he took Tom Glazer back to the house and solemnly introduced him—they had met before, often—to Mary. “I’d like you to meet my very great and good friend, Tom Glazer,” he said in sarcastic overelaboration. And then, sotto voce, “I have no friends.”

  Sometimes it seemed to him that he had no marriage, either. It might be, he proposed in his journals, that he drank as a substitute for the love he felt deprived of. “I am not allowed a kiss; I am barely granted good morning.” He and Mary rarely got through dinner without a fight. If the dinner table was a “shark tank,” wasn’t he the dolphin and Mary the shark? Or was it true—as Dr. Silverberg had intimated—that he was incapable of love or could only love himself? “Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings.”

  In the winter of 1969–70, Mary went to St. Croix with Sandra Hochman, a young poet and novelist who lived nearby. Hochman was a friend of both Cheevers—he contributed one of his rare jacket blurbs for her 1971 novel, Walking Papers—but he was upset about the vacation that she and Mary took together. Mary looked on it as an opportunity to escape a tense atmosphere and the slush of Ossining. “How wonderful to get away from edgy people,” she said on her return.

  According to Susan Cheever, her mother had affairs as well as her father. Considering their apparent incompatibility, that hardly seems surprising, though Mary Cheever steadfastly denies it. Whatever the truth of the matter, her husband was convinced that she had been unfaithful to him. During the 1970 Christmas vacation from Briarcliff, Mary spent the day in New York buying presents for the whole family. When she got back to Cedar Lane, John—who had been drinking with Zinny Schoales—accused her of meeting a lover in the city. She wouldn’t have had time, she said, laughing. She’d been too busy shopping. “I couldn’t find your diaphragm,” he said. “You don’t know where to look,” she responded. His suspicions were not allayed.

  Though Mary Cheever was a success in the classroom at Briarcliff, she was let go along with Mary Dirks (who taught drama) at the end of the 1970–71 school year. According to Charles Shapiro, who resigned in protest when the two Marys were fired, the decision was made on political grounds. Along with Maureen Willson, with whom she shared an office at Briarcliff, Mary Cheever vigorously if unsuccessfully supported for tenure the only really productive scholar on the English department staff. He was denied tenure largely for his liberal views, including his stand on the raging issue of the day: should Briarcliff switch from a single-sex female college to coeducation? The administration and senior staff opposed the change, and those who lobbied for it—including both Marys, Shapiro, and the untenured professor—were regarded as troublemakers.

  On a hot mid-May morning when the wisteria was ahum with bees, Mary attended her last graduation at Briarcliff College. But teaching was in her blood, and she went on to teach composition and literature at Staten Island Community College and then at Rockland Country Day School, and—regularly since 1971—to lead a creative writing class in the adult education program of the Briarcliff Manor public schools. The desire to help others, she says of her teaching, may reflect a lack of self-confidence. “When you’re working on someone else’s problems, after all, you’re not working on your own.” Actually, though, she was writing her own poetry in earnest by the time she left Briarcliff. She sent her poems for appraisal both to Malcolm Cowley and to Bernard Malamud. Malamud especially fulfilled her need for a mentor, a rabbi, a particular friend in a bad time.

  For the most part, the Cheevers respected each other’s literary judgment. He frequently read a story or part of a novel to her (and other members of the family) and trusted her response, even when it was unfavorable. Mary didn’t especially like his work, he commented in a 1969 interview, but he didn’t want an admirer for a wife, he wanted “a critical intelligence, another person,” and Mary provided that. As to her poetry, she learned that her husband, who did not pretend to any expertise, nonetheless had “great critical instincts, and could tell quicker than anyone else what was good or bad” about her poems. And she admired his writing more than she was always willing to show. Her husband was “constitutionally unable to write a mediocre line,” she thought, but it was not something she told him. He thought her rivalrous and resentful of his success, literary merit aside.

  Cheever consoled himself with sex, both real and imagined, as well as with liquor. He seduced one of Mary Dirks’s Briarcliff drama students, “an enchanting kid and very experienced.” He saw Hope Lange whenever he could, and when he couldn’t he daydreamed about her, about Aileen Ward, and about a new enthusiasm, Shana Alexander. Shana met the Cheevers through Zinny Schoales. In her teens she had been a copygirl and a reporter on PM, when Zinny was running the financial side, and they had become friends. In 1970, when she was editing McCall’s, Alexander rented a house near Sleepy Hollow Country Club for weekend rendezvous with her lover H.A.L. (Harry) Craig, an Irish poet and screenwriter. Both of them liked to drink, and Cheever naturally gravitated toward them. People who drink need other people to drink with.

  Besides, he was very taken with her, and flirted with her “more or less outrageously,” though her liaison with Craig could not have been more obvious. Shana liked Cheever a lot, all the same. He was cute and he knew it, and that was attractive. He was funny, and that made for wonderful company. He struck her as a small man with no hangups about his size, “a little nut-brown guy with twinkling eyes who was sparkling all the time.” He promised to write her “A Pure and Beautiful Story” for McCall’s, and she asked him down to the Hamptons to discuss it (the story was never written). “I thought he was marvelous,” she said, but there was no physical relationship between them. “Those are not the sorts of things one forgets,” she pointed out.

  She was in any case admitted to his gallery of dream girls. Cheever often said that he “adored” women, meaning women who were good to look at. He would never have anything to do with a woman who was not beautiful, he said. And he liked women of a certain type, Candida Donadio observed: slim, elegant, nicely featured, blondish, not tall, women with quiet voices. Moreover, he was strongly attracted to women who were not only beautiful but accomplished. One writer at Yaddo he found singularly homely. “And her career has been a disaster, too,” he said of her, as if to prove a point. The women he admired combined good looks and a successful, often publicly noteworthy, career. This was the basic pattern with Hope Lange, Aileen Ward, Shana Alexander, Anne Palamountain, Sara Spencer, and Sophia Loren, and—later—with painter Susan Crile and Lauren Bacall. Each of them in her own way outperformed his mother, who had become a career woman perforce. In his imagination—and sometimes in his conversation—they became his lovers. And he imagined, too, that they might give him a mother’s nurturing love. In a dream, for example, he envisioned himself ill, in Rome, with Aileen Ward nursing him back to health.

  At times, half in fantasy, he conjured up a divorce from Mary and a subsequent dream-girl marriage. In 1971, he called daughter Susan one night and told her he was planning to marry “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Hope Lange, but nothing came of it. He spoke openly of Hope as his mistress in social gatherings, even when Mary was present and within earshot. She seemed not to care. One day when he went into New York to see Hope, he returned home for dinner to announce that he loved two women. That was all right with her, Mary said. She was never possessive or jealous about him. If she could help it, she did not intend to let herself be hurt.

  As the marriage ties weakened, Cheever formed an ever closer bond with his younger son. In the fall of 1970, Susie and Rob stayed briefly at Cedar Lane upon their return from fifteen months in Spain and England, but soon they moved to a rented house in Armonk, and she began her writing career as a reporter on the Tarrytown Daily News. Ben, though living nearby, was virtually separated from his family for the nine years following his marri
age in 1969. His wife, Linda, thought he had been given short shrift by his father: when Ben did come by the house, often it was to ask for money. Fred was the only child at home. He and his father spent a lot of time together.

  Their relationship was a curious one. John depended on his shy and pudgy son at least as much as Fred did on him. He was as generous with his time as any father could be. They tossed balls back and forth. They sat together and watched television. Once a week in the good weather, they walked the six-mile round trip to the Croton dam accompanied by Hoover, the imaginary dog the boy invented when Maisie went to live with Rob and Susie. On Sundays they occasionally cooked dinner, fashioning Beef Wellington out of a recipe in the New York Times Magazine or a ham soufflé according to the instructions in the Waring blender book. They swam at Sara Spencer’s pool and went skating on her pond. They did almost everything together.