Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  Fred Exley, teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, inveigled Cheever into coming to Iowa City for a reading in the fall of 1972. Cheever arrived well in advance of the scheduled reading, and for three days he and Exley drank and talked together. John spoke bitterly of the state of his marriage, coughed his way through his reading of “The Death of Justina,” and wowed Exley’s writing class with some improbable anecdotes. He was more or less enchanted by the twenty-year-old coed Exley had fallen in love with. He was impressed by the interest in writers and writing around the university. People kept greeting Exley on the street in hopes, as he explained, of getting introduced to Cheever. Jack Leggett, director of the writing program, had a dinner for Cheever and proposed that he might want to spend a semester teaching there. Leggett hardly expected an affirmative answer, but he got one. Cheever signed on for the fall 1973 semester. His writing was not going well in Ossining. He hoped that a change of rivers—from the Hudson to the Iowa—would help. In addition, Fred was leaving for boarding school at Andover in September, and it had been Fred’s presence at home, more than anything else, that kept his parents from separating during the early 1970s.

  In her poem “Gorgon,” Mary Cheever in effect declared her independence while summoning up the very powerful, at least slightly malevolent woman whose image, she believed, was pervasive in her husband’s thoughts as in his fiction. He identified this woman (probably derived from his mother) with Mary herself, and nothing she could do would displace the image.

  I have sometimes complained, husband,

  that as you feinted, shadowboxed and blindly

  jived to that misty monolithic woman in your mind

  I have been battered, drowned under your blows.

  Not knives, not brassknuckles, not poison or needles,

  no weapons, no holds between you two

  were foul or out of bounds.

  Now suddenly in the dawnlight

  lying across our bed while you fuss

  and nicker at my breast

  I can feel myself growing.

  I have become immense.

  The shadows curve black from my body,

  which is glowing moonwhite.

  I am beautiful. God, how beautiful!

  Dear, if you should decide to take

  the gold rings out of my ears,

  you will need a ladder.

  I would help you if I could,

  but my arms have turned to stone.

  Cheever was outraged by the poem, but had it practically by heart.

  If Mary was growing stronger, her husband manifestly was not. His heartbeat was wildly irregular, and he was often short of breath. Dr. Mutter put him on Xylocaine to numb the abnormal heart rhythm and on Seconal to sleep, but the symptoms worsened. In May 1973, Cheever collapsed and was taken to Phelps Memorial Hospital in nearby Tarrytown. A heart attack struck him down, Cheever always said, but that was not entirely accurate. He was afflicted by dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease (according to Dr. Robert A. Johnson, who treated Cheever in Boston during the spring of 1975) that is sometimes caused by alcoholism and is often fatal. In cardiomyopathy the left ventricle stops ejecting blood, the heart dilates under the consequent pressure, and the lungs fill with fluid. What hospitalized Cheever, technically, was not a heart attack—EKGs showed no evidence of such an attack—but a pulmonary edema brought on by drink.

  In the hospital, deprived of liquor, he began to hallucinate. For three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—he was convinced that he was being held in a Russian prison camp, and tried frantically to get free. He detached the oxygen tubes and ripped out his IV. Family and friends took turns at bedside, holding him down. When he was alone, nurses strapped him to the bed and straitjacketed him. In the delirium of alcoholic withdrawal, he refused to acknowledge reason. Susan brought him a copy of a favorable review of The World of Apples, his collection of stories that had just been published, but Cheever thought it was a confession for him to sign and flung it on the floor. Finally, though, he was ready to be persuaded that he was in a Westchester County hospital and not a Soviet prison camp, especially after Fred produced a sign printed in English. “Oxygen—No Smoking” it read.

  In a letter to Gottlieb, he made light of his illness, as a consequence of which “wealthy and beautiful divorcées” brought him gifts. Still, the experience obviously scared him. Both Dr. Mutter and Dr. Frank Jewett, a psychiatrist, assured him that if he started to drink again, he would kill himself. In consultation with Jewett, he compared the euphoria of alcohol to that of writing something you really like. He resisted the implications of the observation: that if he wasn’t writing anything he much liked, he might turn to alcohol as a substitute. He soon abandoned therapy with Jewett, and refused to join Alcoholics Anonymous. But he was frightened enough to quit drinking, temporarily. He felt delivered from the grave. If it was possible to start a new life at sixty-one, that’s what he intended to do. “Alcohol seems no problem,” he cheerfully announced early in June. Two months later he admitted to taking three drinks a day.

  On May 16, as Cheever lay bound to his bed fancying himself in a Soviet prison camp, five men in New York nominated him for elevation from the National Institute to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Or, rather, they renominated him, since his name was first proposed in 1971 by Robert Penn Warren, Malcolm Cowley, Peter Blume, John Hersey, and Mark Van Doren. The sponsors were the same two years later, except that Van Doren was replaced by Glenway Wescott. “In a series of stories unsurpassed in his generation and in his excellent novels,” Warren wrote in the nominating petition, “John Cheever has reported faithfully a segment of modern America and at the same time has created a world that embodies his personal vision.” Not until November did Cheever get word that he had been elected.

  Critics as well as his artistic peers were well disposed toward Cheever’s work in the spring of 1973. They gave The World of Apples a strongly favorable reception, though it is arguable that few of the stories in the book measure up to Cheever’s best. Several of them begin or end brilliantly. In each there are passages of limpid iridescence that only Cheever could have written. Yet only rarely do these stories achieve the emotional power of “The Enormous Radio” or “Goodbye, My Brother” or “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer.” The most moving piece in the collection is the shortest, one in a series of vignettes printed as “Three Stories.” On a transatlantic plane trip from New York to Rome, a well-intentioned man in the aisle seat tries to conduct a civil conversation with the woman in the window seat, but she rudely repudiates all his overtures. Then the plane lands, and why is the man helping collect her bags and why does he join her in the cab? “Is he the undiscouragable masher that she dreaded? No, no. He is her husband, she is his wife, the mother of his children, and a woman he has worshipped passionately for nearly thirty years.” That was a cry from the heart.

  Aside from “Percy” and “The Jewels of the Cabots,” both of which draw on his Yankee heritage, most of the stories are concerned either with loveless marriages or with sex. His characters are bombarded by exhibitions of pornography and scatology. The world has become so overtly dirty-minded, one story suggests, that pure literature has gone underground and can only be found on lavatory walls. Yet in “Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger” Cheever depicts a man whose innocence protects him from the venality and venery around him. And in the title story, the aging poet Asa Bascomb finally purges his mind of obscene thoughts. In the act of exorcism, he strips naked and stands under the torrent of a waterfall, bellowing with joy, just as his father had done many years before.

  In these stories as in much of Cheever’s fiction, water has miraculous restorative powers. Two women emerge naked from the sea at the end of “Goodbye, My Brother,” and bring back the joy that the despised brother, Lawrence, apparently sought to dissipate. It is the rain on his head, and the smell of it flying up to his nose, that cures Johnny Hake of his Shady Hill housebreaking. The narrator in “A Vision of the World,”
awakened by the rain, sits up in bed and exclaims to himself, “Valor! Love!… Wisdom! Beauty!” Reciting the words and listening to the sound of the rain make him “contented and at peace with the night.” Nailles saves his son, Tony, from immolation in the midst of a rainstorm. Artemis the good “loved the healing sound of rain—the sound of all running water—brooks, gutters, spouts, falls, and taps.” Stepping out of the waterfall, Asa Bascomb seems at last to be himself. “In the morning he began a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that, while it would not get him the Nobel Prize, would grace the last months of his life.” Water and light, light and water—only these kept “the world from flying to pieces.”

  IOWA-BOSTON-SMITHERS

  1973–1975

  With Fred packed off to Andover, Ben more or less estranged, Susie and Rob’s marriage breaking up, and his relationship with Mary worsening, Cheever returned to Iowa City in the fall of 1973 to teach for a semester at the university’s famous writers’ workshop. The Iowa sky was bluer and clearer than in the East, and the twilights longer. Front porches ran the width of the houses, declaring themselves to passersby. The Iowa River, a ten-minute swim across at its widest, wound through the campus and the town. The cornfields began at the outskirts, but corn—Cheever soon learned—did not presage “vulgarity and provincialism.” Students who walked barefoot in the warm fall weather were carrying Wittgenstein and Descartes, Double-Entry Bookkeeping and Basic Italian. His aspiring writers were extraordinarily talented, his teaching colleagues accomplished professionals. He was in another country, and loved it nearly as much as the long-term settlers. “Don’t tell anyone,” they warned him. “They’ll only spoil it.” “Iowa City—Gateway to Nebraska,” they called it, in hopes that visitors would keep going to Omaha.

  The worm in this Midwestern apple was his small and sparsely furnished room in Iowa House. A four-story red-brick building run by the university, Iowa House resembled nothing so much as a large motel, with a cafeteria downstairs and ice and Coke machines on every floor. The rooms featured motel-standard blue carpeting, green bedspreads, and beige walls. Cheever’s had two single beds and a dresser, bolted to which was a nineteen-inch black-and-white television set. It was not much of a home away from home, but the window offered a redeeming view of the serpentine river, the bridge across it, and the people who jogged or strolled along its banks in the morning and evening.

  At first Cheever seemed uneasy in his new surroundings. Fellow instructor John Irving, not yet famous for The World According to Garp, asked him over on the day of his arrival, and Cheever seemed proper, polite, and unhappy. He wore a navy-blue suit, with the pin of the National Institute on his lapel. Ron Hansen, novelist-to-be but then a student and teaching fellow in the workshop, asked him what the pin represented, and Cheever explained about the National Institute and the American Academy “as if he were prepared to be patient about anything now that he’d accepted a visiting professorship.” Yet it was not really necessary, in Iowa, for Cheever to declare who he was. Students and faculty alike eagerly awaited his arrival. The local newspaper ran a feature about him. The president of the university asked him to dinner. He was also invited elsewhere, often. Iowa was proud to have him around, and eager to show him a good time. He was soon caught up in a variety of things to do and people to do them with. He went to jazz concerts and a bluegrass festival. He went to boat races and rugby games and the Big Ten football games on Saturday. He began to get acquainted with some of those curious folk who foregather in university towns—the odd ducks among the professoriate and student body, the graduates who decide, having nothing better to do, to hang around and pursue eccentric lives.

  Cheever’s closest friendships in Iowa, naturally enough, were made through the writers’ workshop. He and John Irving used to watch Monday Night Football together while eating homemade pasta. Cheever told Irving, as he told almost everyone, that his marriage was on the rocks, that he suspected his wife of adultery, and that he felt terribly lonely. Irving was touched by his vulnerability, and pleased that such a wonderful writer was willing to treat him as an equal. The bond between them was solidified by the visit to campus of J. P. Donleavy. Both Irving and Cheever admired Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, but Donleavy himself was something else. Irving picked up the Donleavys at the airport and drove them around, whereupon they began to act like “unhappy royalty in a hick town.” Was this Kansas? they wanted to know. Donleavy let it be known that he read the work of no one living, and that he thought writing workshops a great waste of time. Introduced to Cheever, he acted as if he weren’t even there. When Cheever tried to engage him in conversation—“and Cheever,” Irving pointed out, “was as gifted in conversation as any man I ever met”—Donleavy remained coldly discourteous.

  Finally Cheever had had enough. “Do you know, Mr. Donleavy,” he said, “that no major writer of fiction was ever a shit to another writer of fiction, except Hemingway—and he was crazy?” He and Irving decided not to attend Donleavy’s reading, instead retiring to a bar to debate whether the visitor was “a minor writer, a shit, crazy—or all three.”

  Raymond Carver, also teaching in the fiction program at the workshop and living in Iowa House, was gratified to have Cheever for a colleague. “He was a writer, not a beginner like myself,” Carver remembers, and he had never heard anyone so eloquent and witty in his use of the spoken language. Still, it was liquor that tied them together. Both were serious drinkers at the time, serious enough so that they almost never took the covers off their own typewriters. Twice a week Carver drove them to the liquor store to stock up. Once they made a date to meet in the lobby of Iowa House shortly before the liquor store opened at ten o’clock. Cheever was pacing up and down the lobby when Carver arrived, on time. The clerk was just opening the door when they got to the store, but Cheever clambered out of the car before it was properly parked and was standing at the checkout counter with his half-gallon of Scotch by the time Carver got inside.

  “Oh, yes,” Mary said of her husband’s Midwestern sojourn, “John went out to Iowa to drink.” Liberated from the usual domestic restraints, he was soon drinking as much as he had before the May 1973 collapse, and investigating the sexual revolution. As Allan Gurganus recalls, Cheever “essentially came on to almost every student he found at all attractive,” of either sex. This was done with great charm and without dodging, liquor smoothing the way for whatever did or did not happen. At the first private conference with his writing students, Cheever offered them a water glass full of straight Scotch. Gurganus drank his down, dutifully, and reeled out into the early-afternoon sun.

  Cheever had two classes at Iowa, one a fiction-writing seminar and the other a literature course built around novels he’d read and liked. The competition for places in both courses was fierce. In the fiction-writing course, especially, Cheever confronted the very best second-year graduate students. Three members of that workshop—Gurganus, Hansen, and T. Coraghessan (Tom) Boyle—went on to become novelists, and all of them knew their way around writing seminars better than their instructor. That class, Hansen reports, had the sharpest competitive edge of any he ever attended. “And yet Cheever managed to make it generally civil through the simple exercise of good manners, propriety, and decorum.” Manifestly he did not like arguments. And when he liked a story, he could ill abide unwarranted criticism of it. Tom Boyle, for example, vividly recalls Cheever coming to the defense of a story of his called “Drowning.”

  In private conferences, Cheever had an uncanny sense for what did or did not work, but was not always able to indicate why. He was very good at fixing sentences and at suggesting character through description and detail. Perhaps a boy “could lick a finger to comb his eyebrows,” he suggested to Gurganus, and it could turn out that his parents hated that gesture. Or perhaps an aging man, instead of simply getting fat and bald, might wonder why his knees had begun to feel “squashy.”

  Meeting his first class at Iowa, Cheever was terribly nervous, and the more nervous h
e got the more gargly his talk became. He asked the students about their favorite authors. A few mentioned Vonnegut and Barth, which were not the answers he was looking for. Others said Proust and Balzac, and that was more like it. Then he launched his students on a regimen that some of them—already in the process of writing novels—thought unnecessarily fundamental. He asked them, first of all, to keep a journal for at least a week, recording their experiences, feelings, dreams, orgasms, and even such quotidian details as the clothes they wore and the food and drink they consumed. Second, he required them to write a story in which seven people or landscapes that superficially have nothing to do with one another are somehow profoundly allied. Third, and this was his favorite assignment, he told them to write a love letter from inside a burning building. This exercise “never fails,” he maintained. In Gurganus’s case it led to a piece that went right into the Atlantic Monthly. He had but one standard for grading the results: “Is it interesting or is it dull?”

  Cheever found teaching at Iowa a tremendously invigorating experience. His students were “brilliant and diverse” and eager to learn. Above all he wanted them to take notice, to be alive to the world around them and the people in it. John Gerber, then chairman of the Iowa English department, persuaded Cheever to speak about writing to a Unitarian group one evening. Afterward someone asked, “What do you look for when you see people? Take John Gerber, for example. What do you see when you look at him?” “No,” Cheever replied, “I won’t take John Gerber but I’ll take you. I notice for one thing that you have a fine and full voice, and I assume that you like to use it …” and so on. (In fact, the questioner was a wonderful singer.) Gerber thought Cheever unusual among writing instructors for the interest he took in his students. He didn’t just meet his classes and disappear. Some of his students became his intimate friends.