Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  In time, Fred assumed the function of protecting his father against his baser instincts. When they went swimming, the fourteen-year-old cautioned his father not to swim naked: people might come along. When he came home from Hackley and a losing soccer game, tired and upset, and his father was drunk and nasty, Fred yelled at him over the dinner table and struck him in his chair afterward. The physical threats all went one way, for John was in terrible shape from alcohol and Fred was much the largest of the Cheevers. Later, when Suntory sent Cheever a case of their whiskey, Fred poured most of it down the drain. The boy proved his usefulness time and again as parent to his own father.

  Though Cheever had very different relations with each of his children, it is noteworthy—as Fred points out—that they all stand up for him. “He always cared enormously, even in the worst times with Ben.” Moreover, he “valued family life more than anyone I’ve ever known,” Fred observes. Only in domesticity could he feel a kind of redemption, a sense of his own goodness. Otherwise, as in his journals, he excoriated himself. In this connection, Fred cites a story about the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Universally regarded as a brilliant and wonderful man, Whitehead was talking to himself on a walk across campus when a student came up behind him and overheard what he was saying. The great man was cursing himself.

  Fred traveled with his parents wherever they went during those years. In the summer of 1970, for instance, John took him and Mary along on his trip to South Korea as a delegate to the Thirty-seventh International PEN Congress. Updike was also a delegate to this meeting. The American delegation was seated next to the South Vietnamese. At one session, Updike recalls, Cheever turned to him and said, “with mixed alarm and delight, that the Vietnamese next to him was quite crazy.” For the most part the trip was a success. Each delegate was welcomed with silks and flowers and a three-volume edition of the speeches of General Park, the South Korean president.

  At a geisha house Cheever was “washed, examined, kissed, and fed by hand.” At the National Theater, dancing girls performed for the visiting dignitaries, and Updike’s noticing—upon close observation—that their knees were wrinkled inspired an exchange of doggerel with Mary Cheever.

  Mary addressed Updike as an “eagley American” who

  clasps the legs with languid hands

  of dancing girls in Orient lands.

  Ringed with the stars and stripes he stands.

  The wrinkled knees beneath him crawl.

  He squirms, he writhes, he climbs the wall

  and on his dimpled plumpside falls.

  Updike responded amiably:

  I hope that I may never seize

  Another pair of wrinkled knees,

  But if I do, I hope that they

  Are somewhere east of Oakland Bay.

  The Cheevers stopped again in Japan on the trip home, ignoring the attractions of Expo to look at shrines and cedar forests and waterfalls. The three of them came home refreshed by their travels. The following year, John took Fred along on his second journey to Russia.

  The Soviet Writers Union invited Cheever to represent his country at the Dostoyevsky jubilee in the fall of 1971. He and Fred arrived at Moscow in a blizzard. Asked if there was anything he’d like, Cheever said, “I’d really like a swim.” His Russian hosts huddled, and then dispatched him to Tbilisi instead of Riga, the headquarters for the Dostoyevsky observances. It was warm in Tbilisi, the leaves just beginning to fall, and father and son swam in the rivers of southwestern Georgia while speeches and concerts in honor of the Russian writer “raged in snowbound Riga.” At Homeric banquets the Cheevers were provided with vast quantities of wine and vodka, multiple toasts were offered, and it was considered impolite not to participate. “Heavy drinking was virtually a social obligation in that society,” Fred recalls. The boy, only fourteen, had more than enough to drink himself, and contracted a bad case of indigestion. During a half-hour interview show on Georgian television, he discovered—five minutes into the show—that an attack of diarrhea was imminent. He sweated out the half hour, literally, and then, desperate for relief, was led to a floor drain that manifestly would not serve his emergency.

  As in 1964, Cheever was impressed by the Russians’ hospitality, their fondness for ceremony, and their respect for the art of writing. At the home of the poet laureate of Georgia, the master of the house opened a bottle of wine before dinner and his wife took the bottle and sprinkled a bit of wine on the linen tablecloth as she moved around the beautifully appointed table. Her guests were not to feel embarrassed, she explained, should they spill some wine. From Georgia they flew back to the snow and cold of Moscow and Leningrad for the rest of their two-week stay. Cheever collected six thousand rubles in royalties there, and even after buying nine fur hats and five strings of amber, he had sixteen hundred rubles left. He could not take the money out of the country, and so when it was time to return, he offered to give it to Tanya Litvinov. She couldn’t accept it herself, she said, but would take it to help publish samizdats, underground books and pamphlets. At this stage Cheever withdrew the offer.

  As he later explained his actions, he feared that if he gave Tanya money for samizdats she might “end up on a Siberian manure pile.” In addition, it seemed to him, perhaps naively, that Russia was a country where writers were valued for their work, political considerations aside. He worried that the success of Bullet Park in that country was due to its implicit criticism of the contemporary American scene. “If you think that’s what the book is about, we’ve both failed,” he told his Russian colleagues. That was not it at all, they assured him. They liked the book because of its evocation of the natural world, the way he described autumn leaves blowing in automobile headlights.

  Undoubtedly, too, he was flattered by the attention paid him in Russia, the sense that he was more honored elsewhere than at home or in the United States generally. In Moscow, for example, he was taken to the Kremlin to meet Nikolai V. Podgorny, the president of the Supreme Soviet. (Podgorny kept a shoeshine machine in his office.) At the same time he well understood the repressive side of the government that honored him. In Leningrad he was less reckless on walks than he had been seven years earlier. He was probably a little afraid that the Soviets might kidnap him (and his son), and so “always said very nice things” about Russia, Fred thought.

  In October, Cheever went to Chicago on his own, lured by the munificence of Playboy to its International Writers’ Convocation. Sean O’Faolain, Alberto Moravia, and V. S. Pritchett attended from overseas, along with American columnists, political commentators, sportswriters, and at least one poet—James Dickey. The convocation, held at the Playboy Towers hotel, was “lavish, decorous, and a success.” The assembled writers feasted on caviar and rack of lamb, and drank all they wanted in the Writers’ Lounge, kept open until 4:00 A.M. each night. There were, however, no bunnies on display, since editorial director A. C. Spectorsky wanted to keep the meeting serious. Futurist Arthur C. Clarke, addressing the group, envisioned a society in which no one would go to the office. “The slogan will be, ‘Don’t commute, communicate.’” Cheever nodded vigorously in agreement and sailed a paper airplane across the table.

  He stole away from such heady thoughts long enough to have lunch with Dick Stern at the Pump Room, where they called Hope Lange from their table. (She wasn’t home.) And he visited a steam room with Saul Bellow, where—he maintained—Bellow inspected Cheever’s parts while he studiously avoided gazing at Bellow’s. The rest of Bellow looked more Olympian, he admitted, but he suspected Saul “was trying.” Both enjoyed the steam bath visit. As Bellow observed, “writers don’t get a chance to talk with each other naked very often.”

  Also in the summer of 1971, Cheever began teaching a class in creative writing at the Ossining Correctional Facility, a.k.a. Sing Sing. To begin with he had no idea of gathering material for a novel. He decided to teach at Sing Sing, he said, because someone at a party had said there were two thousand prisoners and only six teachers. Besides, “it was
closer than Princeton.” On his first day, Cheever was bused inside the prison walls, escorted by guards through the key room and past five clanging gates, unlocked and locked behind them, to a classroom with a yellowed American flag where twenty inmates awaited him. Two of them showed talent, and one of the two, Donald Lang, vividly recalls that first day.

  To begin with, Lang was pretty antagonistic. “Who in hell is John Cheever?” he wondered. When Cheever showed up, Lang was disappointed in the way he looked and annoyed by the way he talked. Writers were supposed to look like Hemingway, or at least act like him. Yet here was this little guy with what sounded like a phony accent. “One expects,” Cheever intoned New Englandly, and Lang thought to himself, “One what?” Was this guy showing off? And why in hell was he coming to Sing Sing now after twenty years in the community? Was this some kind of fashionable thing to do?

  Almost immediately, however, Cheever earned the inmates’ respect by showing up for class after the riots at Attica, another New York state prison thirty miles east of Buffalo. On September 9, about half of the twenty-two hundred prisoners at Attica revolted, seizing forty guards and others as hostages and taking control of four out of five cellblocks. Four days later, after some highly publicized negotiations with radical figures like Bobby Seale and William Kunstler serving as go-betweens, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state troopers to attack. Behind a blanket of tear gas, they laid down a fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire. Thirty inmates were killed, and two hundred injured. Nine of the hostages were also gunned down. Word of the riots at Attica circulated on the Sing Sing grapevine, and things were very tense there. The prison population of Sing Sing was then about 65 percent black, and there was a sense—Lang said—that if the blacks found a leader, they’d riot. The place was a powder keg about to go off, and the authorities imposed extremely tight security. Yet Cheever came in to teach right after Attica, and Lang “had to admire” him for that.

  “I wonder where a little shit like you gets the balls to come in here,” he said.

  “I don’t think anyone will hurt me, Lang,” Cheever answered.

  As time went on, Lang and Cheever discovered that they had a lot to teach each other, and not only about writing. Lang had spent seventeen of his thirty-one years behind bars, and knew very little about how to act on the outside. But he could, and did, tell Cheever what it was like on the inside. As a visitor to the prison, Cheever was never in a cellblock or the mess hall or the shops. To learn more about Sing Sing, he sat Don down and had him go over the daily routine and tell him stories about the brutality of the place. There was a goon squad to deal with troublemakers, for example. They’d isolate the offender in a cell, and let four or five other guys in to “put a beating” on him. “Dead,” the certificate would read, “by natural causes.”

  Lang told him too about the sadistic “asshole” guard named Tiny and the stray cats that hung around the mess hall, about the homosexuality and the fights. Cheever stored the anecdotes away, later to emerge in Falconer, his 1977 novel set in a prison very like Sing Sing.

  Lang and Cheever became close friends after Lang’s release from Sing Sing in December 1971. When Lang got out, Cheever and William Campbell were there to drive him to the halfway house in Poughkeepsie. Two weeks later he was back in Ossining, working for Gray Smith’s Street Theater and installed as a boarder in the home of John and Mary Dirks. “This little pale black Irish type showed up” on her doorstep, Mary remembers, and stayed for almost a year. Lang would look no one in the eye and had no concept of social obligation, yet there was a natural sweetness in him, he was handy around the house, and he was obviously intelligent. He took the Dirkses to see The French Connection, elaborating on the fine points of that world of cops and robbers, drugs and pimps. They gave him for the first time a patterned and comfortable life—he had never seen a fire in a fireplace before—and tried to show him how people who built fires in fireplaces talked and acted and used their knives and forks. At one cocktail party, Lang remembers, he and Cheever were “doing some bullshit” when someone walked up and asked, with real wonderment, “Where did you two meet, anyway?” “Oh,” Cheever answered, enjoying it, “in Sing Sing.”

  Cheever took a protective attitude toward Lang, most of the time. When Lang got drunk and knocked out all his teeth falling down a flight of concrete steps, Cheever helped him pay for the dentures. When a car dealer sold Lang a lemon, Cheever went down to the dealer and bitched. When Lang got mixed up in a barroom brawl, Cheever bailed him out of jail. “I would like,” he told Lang afterward, “not to do this again.”

  Cheever made him feel he might do something with his life, Lang said. He encouraged his writing, and recommended his satirical “The Pit-Wig Papers” to Candida Donadio. With the Street Theater Lang demonstrated his talents at carpentry and electricity. He also handled the logistics for a touring company of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men that performed—among other places—within the walls of Sing Sing. Then he struck out on his own doing odd jobs for contractors and working occasionally for Cheever and Art Spear. One spring day, he cut Fred Cheever’s hair, using some barbering skills he’d picked up in prison. One summer, Fred worked happily with Lang and his crew of (mostly) ex-cons.

  Above all it was Cheever’s willingness to accept Lang, despite his criminal record, that solidified their relationship. As a mentor he had mixed results. He could not cure Lang of his habit of showing up without calling first. “You can’t do that,” he’d say. “You’re interrupting my work.” “What work?” Lang would ask. “I don’t see no hammer, no paintbrush.” And he could not persuade Lang to embark on a reading program he’d devised. The best teaching method, Cheever found, was that of example. He took Lang to a restaurant in Croton for soft-shelled crabs; after he ate the whole thing himself, Lang reluctantly did the same. “He taught me a lot by association,” Lang says. “He didn’t tell me, but showed me.”

  They both enjoyed the outdoor life—hiking through the woods, swimming, ice skating. They made a six-pool journey one day, à la “The Swimmer.” Though Lang was, in Cheever’s phrase, “a comely man,” he was not welcomed at every pool. Iole had her reservations about him, too. She was fixing lunch when Lang was working around the house, and asked Mary Cheever, in Italian, if she was supposed to feed il ladro too. Lang had picked up enough street Italian to know that il ladro meant thief. Occasionally Cheever took Lang into New York City for dinner, where such questions were not asked. Candida Donadio went out with them one night, where it seemed clear to her that Cheever was smitten by Lang.

  Whenever they’d meet, he gave Lang a hug. “It took time to get used to that,” Don remembers, but he took it as an indication of Cheever’s need for physical affection. He seemed to be terribly lonely. “Do you have any buddies?” Lang asked him. “Arthur Spear’s a buddy of mine,” Cheever replied. “You mean, you two old guys are buddies?” Lang asked incredulously. Cheever didn’t seem to have any “tight friends,” Lang thought. “I don’t know who would be a tight friend except for me.”

  Once Lang really got to know Cheever, there didn’t seem to be any facade to him at all. Lang refused to be impressed by anything he said or did, and with him Cheever shucked off the restraints of suburban middle-class mores. If he wanted to dive into a pond, he did. If he wanted to drink at the Orchid Lounge, a black bar in downtown Ossining, he did that too, matching Lang’s beers with martinis and talking away the afternoon. There was a real sympathy between them. “We didn’t have to say anything,” Lang recalls. “He’d just read it if I was up or down.” Cheever felt an affinity for the ex-convict, as for all those who dared to subvert the expectations of organized society. In any dispute between the cons and the guards at Sing Sing, he was all for the cons.

  Over a period of time, his weekly visits to Sing Sing became burdensome. In the summer of 1972, when the Boyers moved away from Westchester, they donated some of their books to the prison library, including a set of the Harvard Classics. Cheever delivered the boxes, and
had to wait in the hot room for what seemed an eternity while the guards inspected each book, page by page, for possible subversive material. They found two old Christmas cards. In the hot weather the prison seemed “cruel and dangerous.” During the 1972–73 year he acquired a couple of new students with talent, but their stories were depressingly similar. More and more he was troubled by “the blasphemy of men building, stone by stone, hells for other men.” Going to Sing Sing was like “participating in an obscenity.” He stuck it out, though, until the spring of 1973.

  With so little fiction issuing from his typewriter, the free-spending side of Cheever gave way to the parsimonious one. When Susie and Ben came to him for loans, they were turned down. In the spring of 1972, he was ready to resign from the Century Club as a luxury he could ill afford. His depression extended beyond the realm of finances. It was as if he were ready to drop out entirely. At a Yaddo board meeting he spoke of his own career as finished. It was time, he said, for younger people to take over.

  Privately, he rather resented the competition, particularly from the school of fabulists—John Hawkes, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon—whose reputations were flourishing in academic circles. Barthelme was “taking his space” in The New Yorker, he feared. It was unfair to Barthelme as a young writer, he told Morris Lurie, to praise him so highly when he had so far written so little. As for Barth, he used to tell the story of a literary dinner where he, Barth, and Jean Stafford were all in attendance. Stafford drew him aside and remarked, “John, your reputation in American literature is very shaky. God knows what will happen to it, but if you put a knife in Barth’s back, you will be immortal.”

  Television offered yet another threat to his occupation. “Television debases literature,” he said in a May 1972 talk at son Fred’s Hackley School. TV shows demanded little or nothing of their viewers: they were designed to be forgotten the next morning, if not sooner. “I’d hate to write a book and think I was competing for the attention of a man who was reading and watching football at the same time.” Literature was one of the glories of mankind, but this new medium put it in peril and so threatened his whole reason for existence. Only occasionally was he reassured, as by a review of Updike’s that made him feel writing fiction was more important than “ironing shirts in a Chinese laundry.”