Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  Actually, Cheever asked for two things that the university rarely provided. First of all, he insisted that B.U. provide him with an apartment. After some difficulty one was located at 71 Bay State Road, only a few blocks from the campus. Three full flights up, the apartment was nicely furnished if rather stuffy. The urban neighborhood was far from the paradise that Iowa had been. A line of brick bow-fronts faced him across the street. Break-ins were reported several times a week. Lacking green fields, students sailed their Frisbees at traffic intersections. For exercise Cheever walked the six-mile round trip to the Ritz Bar downtown: past Kenmore Square where the wind howled around the corners of the embalming school, along Commonwealth Avenue with its statues of William Lloyd Garrison and George Washington, Leif Ericson and the President of the Argentine.

  The other thing that Cheever asked for—or hinted at, rather broadly—was female companionship. At Iowa, he intimated to Starbuck, he had been “provided” with a graduate student who slept with him. Since that seemed to be the style these days, couldn’t B.U. do the same? There was a twinkle in his voice as he made the point, but Starbuck felt sure he was serious about it and might have tried to make such an arrangement if there had been an obvious candidate in evidence. What he did not realize, at first, was Cheever’s need for companionship of all kinds. Other visiting writers—John Barth and Arturo Vivante among them—had sought protection against too much collegial socializing. So Starbuck was surprised when Cheever remarked, in November, that he’d hoped to be introduced around.

  Within the English department, he felt a certain affinity for poet Anne Sexton (“I’m not the living Sylvia Plath,” she used to insist), who stocked her handbag with airline liquor samples for department meetings, and for writer John Malcolm Brinnin (“I knew Cheever intimately but not well,” Brinnin cryptically observes), but no one became his close companion or drinking buddy. Beginning what he regarded as a new life, Cheever was avid for human intercourse, but the phone didn’t ring. Inexplicably, he’d had the number unlisted.

  Starbuck also realized too late how much Cheever craved public recognition. If he had it to do over again, Starbuck observed, he would arrange for Cheever to be honored by the Boston Public Library, make some outreach to the mayor, involve the Athenaeum. As did Willy Loman, Cheever needed attention paid, the more so since he was losing confidence in his abilities. He was working on a novel, he told an interviewer in October. The book would be his tenth and probably his last. Ten made a nice round number, and he would rather stop than publish drivel the way some older writers did. The trouble was, there was no second career for worn-out writers. “Unlike baseball players, they can’t sell insurance. Unlike prostitutes, they can’t be hostesses.”

  His writing students in Boston, with a few exceptions, were not as talented as those at Iowa. Besides, there were far too many of them. Cheever was assigned two writing classes, one for graduate students and one for undergraduates: forty students in all. At first, he wrote Coates, his classes were “wonderfully responsive and contentious” and sometimes ran over three hours in length. By mid-October, that initial enthusiasm had dissipated. It was then that James Valhouli came to Boston to see him.

  Valhouli, like Coates, did his doctoral dissertation on Cheever’s work (Wisconsin, 1973), and during the 1974–75 academic year he was on leave from Bradford College in nearby Haverhill, Massachusetts. He planned to spend the time observing and taperecording Cheever’s classes at Boston University, and then to write an article on the author as teacher. On Valhouli’s first visit, however, Cheever had difficulty negotiating the walk to class after two hours of drinking Scotch. Inside, he was “visibly uncomfortable” facing grad students who knew very well he was drinking. Valhouli went to class with Cheever twice more, and then abandoned his project. It was too painful.

  Valhouli continued to drive down to Boston periodically to see Cheever, however. He saw his role as that of a friend helping another man survive. He tried to cheer him up when Cheever spoke of his “crazy impulse” to throw himself in front of a car or described the dream he had of pallbearers carrying a coffin, with himself inside. He tried to get him to eat, for otherwise he was liable to drink indefinitely. He tried to get him to bed at a reasonable hour. Most of all, Valhouli provided Cheever with company, since he was “desperately lonely” and badly in need of companionship. By midwinter, Valhouli decided he couldn’t keep up the relationship. It became clear that when he spent an afternoon and evening with Cheever, he couldn’t get back to Bradford without risking an automobile accident.

  Cheever also turned to Laurens Schwartz, the ablest of his writing students, for care and comradeship. Now a lawyer and author in New York City, Schwartz had been a student of Robert Penn Warren’s at Yale and eagerly looked forward to working with Cheever. On September 25, after one of the first class meetings, Schwartz accompanied Cheever to a bar in a nearby hotel. Cheever’s routine was already known there. The bartender—a middle-aged blonde in a short skirt—brought him a double vodka on the rocks as soon as he sat down and kept his cigarettes lit. Terribly depressed, Cheever began to sob. He was separated from his wife, he said, and couldn’t function on his own. He had been living on oranges and hamburgers for seventeen days. He had no clean clothes. His apartment was dirty. On most weekends Mary came up from Ossining to take care of him, tidy up the apartment, and stock the refrigerator. She did not regard the marriage as finished, but rather in a state of disrepair owing to her husband’s alcoholism. Except for her ministrations, he seemed unable or unwilling to care for himself. Schwartz was enlisted to help out: to fix instant coffee, walk him to class, tell him to go to the doctor.

  It was clear that Cheever needed medical assistance. He drank and smoked steadily throughout his waking hours. His hands shook so violently it sometimes took him a dozen matches to light a cigarette. In his stupor he occasionally faded off into another world for a few moments. Once Schwartz removed a burning cigarette from his lap. It was very much like taking care of a child, and yet—as with his son Fred—Cheever thought of himself as father, not son. He often spoke about procreation. “I want seventy-two million children,” he said, and talented young men like Schwartz qualified as protégé-offspring. One night Cheever sat down at his typewriter and started revising a story of Schwartz’s. “I’m going to get it published for you,” he announced, and he might have been able to do so. Even when drunk, he could produce “paragraphs of pure Cheever,” if not entire stories. But Schwartz wanted to be his own kind of writer. He ripped the paper out of the typewriter.

  Early in October, Anne Sexton committed suicide. Though she and Cheever had not been close friends, her death deepened his depression. He threatened to resign, then thought better of it and stayed on through the worst days of his life.

  On a few occasions Cheever saw John Updike, then living a mile away in Boston and separated from his wife Mary. “I tried to entertain him,” Updike recalls, “but he was hard to entertain.” They drove up to Andover to visit Cheever’s son Fred and Updike’s son David. They went to see a Garbo film at the Museum of Fine Arts, but it was sold out and instead they dined at Café Budapest, a place Cheever seemed enchanted by. They went, in Boston idiom, “to Symphony.” When Updike came to pick him up, Cheever opened the door naked, and for a second Updike was terrified that the door would close and lock behind him. Cheever needed help getting into his clothes, and lasted at Symphony only until intermission. “He was jumpy and needless to say foggy,” Updike remembers. Yet even at his foggiest, “a flash of wit and perception would remind you that it was John Cheever in there.”

  Through the mails he issued calls for help. “I lost my vicuna coat in a bar,” Gurganus remembered him writing. “Three people had to bring me home.” “Death is—like drink—sometimes an irresistible temptation,” he wrote Coates after Sexton’s suicide. “I sometimes feel that I am approaching an abyss.” He had to leave Ossining, he said, but hadn’t arrived at a destination. Boston was terrible, he wrote Sara Spencer.
His building had been robbed seven times. To the Friday Club, he was still more explicit. “This place is straight asshole,” he wrote them.

  Over the Christmas break he came home to Ossining, but spent much of the holiday in Phelps Memorial with a recurrence of his drastically irregular heartbeat and severe shortness of breath. The symptoms were bad enough to confine him to intensive care for a few days. He was then moved to a hospital room whose window curtains were painted with poppies and foxglove. There, or so he imagined, a young priest knocked on his door. “I’ve come to give you Holy Communion,” the priest said. “Shall I kneel?” Cheever asked, the priest said, “Yes, please,” and he knelt on the cold linoleum in his hospital pajamas and received Communion. The priest then left, and Cheever never knew who he was or where he had come from. On release from the hospital, he immediately resumed drinking. He seemed determined to drink himself to death. When he went back to Boston, Susie feared she would never see him alive again.

  The second semester in Boston was a disaster. Dean Doner, a writer and Boston University administrator, took Cheever to lunch one day. Midway through lunch Cheever mentioned that it was the date of The New Yorker’s fiftieth anniversary party. “You’re not going?” Doner asked in astonishment. No, Cheever bitterly replied, he hadn’t been invited, though he’d written “more god-damn words” for the magazine than anyone else. He’d never gotten along with Shawn, and perhaps that was why he hadn’t been asked. Or maybe people at the magazine were afraid that he’d cause them some embarrassment because of his drinking. (In fact, only full-time staff were invited to the fiftieth anniversary: no contributors, and not even spouses. Either Cheever did not know that, or did not want to know it.)

  As they parted, Doner realized how down and out Cheever was. When he’d parked the car before lunch, Doner had dropped a quarter in the gutter, full of dirty water from a hard rain, and decided to leave it there. After lunch they went back to the car together, and Cheever said he’d rather walk home than get a ride. Doner then drove off, and looked back to see Cheever hunkered down, scraping around in the dirty water for the quarter. When Eddie Newhouse brought John a care package of food from Mary, he found him “sodden drunk,” reduced to crawling up the steps on all fours. Newhouse tried to get him to a doctor, but Cheever said not to bother, he was all right. One day, according to an autobiographical story, Cheever tried to put a hat atop the statue of the President of the Argentine on a walk down Commonwealth Avenue. The weather was frigid, but he wore no overcoat. “Gentlemen never wear overcoats,” his father had told him. Then he spied a bum drinking out of a brown paper bag and sat down with him. They were sitting there, drinking “some kind of fortified wine” out of the brown paper bag, when a policeman came along and threatened to arrest them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Cheever rather grandly said. “My name is John Cheever.” The cop was unimpressed.

  When he finally did go to see a doctor, Cheever affected a similar hauteur. He arrived poorly groomed and sloppily dressed, Dr. Robert A. Johnson recalls, and could not articulate his words clearly, but what words they were! Even drunk, he spoke quite beautifully. Most of all, though, he was concerned that everyone should know who he was. He was not a common drunk, he insisted, not a bum. Whoever he was, Dr. Johnson told him, he would have to stop drinking or his cardiomyopathy would kill him.

  In the last months in Boston he was unable to cope with his social and financial obligations. Sally Swope drove up with Mary to help clean the apartment, and asked John to a dinner party at her father’s house in Louisburg Square. Cheever arrived at that distinguished address, slipped and banged his head on the newel post, and appeared at the dinner table bloody and dirty. He also stopped paying his bills. When the telephone man came to take the phone away early in March, Cheever ripped it off the wall.

  His classes turned into exercises in pathos. At one of the last sessions, a male graduate student contemptuously removed his shirt and strode around the room while Cheever—and the others—pretended not to notice. By the end of March it was clear that he could not go on, and Updike was recruited to meet his classes for the few weeks that remained of the semester. On April 2, Cheever left Boston. In his file at the university there were two unpaid bills from doctors, one from New England Telephone, and a humorous letter from Gurganus describing the gay scene in San Francisco.

  Appropriately, it was his brother, Fred, who picked Cheever up and drove him to Phelps for detoxification. Now divorced and living alone on the South Shore, Fred had been supportive of his younger brother throughout his long siege in Boston. He called every day “to see,” as John put it, “if I am still alive.” At least once a week he took John to lunch, often with a third person accompanying them. Jane Cheever Carr, Cheever’s favorite niece, and Rick Siggelkow, one of his undergraduate students, remember those lunches as pleasant occasions. John would order a roast beef sandwich and then ignore it in favor of his double martinis, but Fred did not chastise him. Instead he went out of his way to restore his brother’s ego. Wasn’t John a wonderful writer? he asked Jane. Wasn’t he a marvelous teacher? he asked Rick.

  Dr. Mutter admitted him to Phelps, where he suffered an episode of delirium tremens during the drying-out period. Then Mutter, Dr. Jewett, and Mary persuaded him to undergo treatment at the Smithers Alcoholism Center in New York City. The center, on East Ninety-third Street, is located in a palatial town house once owned by the flamboyant promoter Billy Rose. The house has an elevator, of course, and its huge octagonal bathroom designed for Eleanor Holm has been converted into a communal washroom for half a dozen men. Smithers was one of the first institutions to provide low-cost care for alcoholics, whether they could pay for it or not. When Cheever was there, his fellow patients included “freaks, cons, Irish policemen, whores, dismal gays … sand-hogs and seamen.” He shared a room with five other men. One was a German delicatessen owner who kept calling out in his sleep, “Haff you been taken care of?” Another was a lame black who brandished his knitting needles and shouted, “I can make anything under the sun with these.” To Cheever it seemed as if he were imprisoned, and he longed to escape.

  The treatment cycle at Smithers runs twenty-eight days, and it took almost all of them for Cheever to acknowledge, first, that he was an alcoholic, and second, that he had to quit drinking if he wanted to survive. In the beginning he simply denied that he needed help, and linked the denial with expressions of grandiosity. He seemed more concerned with impressing others than with acknowledging his own vulnerability. His heart wasn’t bothering him, he said. He had no trouble breathing. He wasn’t depressed. Perhaps the others needed assistance, but he was perfectly able to deal with his own problems. After all, wasn’t he a world-renowned novelist? He also seemed very class-conscious, and held himself aloof from the other patients. Criticized for this in group sessions, he became sarcastic but not overtly angry. It was difficult for him to recognize that no matter what he had done or where he came from, he was every bit as much at risk as the failed con man or the sandhog he beat at backgammon. Staff psychologist Carol Kitman urged him “to drop his John Cheeverdom and see himself as a vulnerable human who could easily be killed by his disease.”

  In conferences with his personal counselor, Ruth Epstein, Cheever struck an attitude of emotional detachment. He admitted to no feelings at all, and she began to wonder whether he actually had any. The clue was the curious little chuckle he produced at inappropriate moments. He spoke, for example, of trying to teach Fred to ride a bicycle, and of how he must have been cruel with the boy, and then chuckled. This was his way, she came to understand, of disguising what was most important to him. It was not that he didn’t care but that he didn’t want others to know how much he cared. He would not even declare that he wanted to live rather than die, but in the end he decided he cared about that most of all.

  His correspondence from Smithers traces a gradual awakening to his responsibility to shake off his addiction and survive. During much of his stay he insisted that he was at Smithers
only on the orders of his internist and his wife, and that he resented the way he was treated. On Sundays, Cheever was released to go to church and spend the afternoon away from the clinic with family and friends. He visited Leonard and Virginia Field on April 26, and delivered a tirade against the cruelty of the group leaders at Smithers, who brutalized him before the others and did so in the worst possible grammar. Gradually, though, the experience of his fellow patients began to sink in. The delicatessen man finished his twenty-eight days and left; he had lost “his wife, his children, his house … his everything.” By the end of the third week, Cheever was beginning to accept his obligation to cure himself. “You can judge the worth” of this process soon, he wrote Laurens Schwartz on April 29. The following day he walked into Ruth Epstein’s office and told her he’d never drink again. Only a few days before he had claimed that he could write as well as ever when drinking, and she had asked him, “But can you make sense of it the next day?” He’d been thinking about that, he said.

  When Cheever was discharged on May 6, the prognosis at Smithers was “guarded.” The consensus was that he was so wrapped up in himself that there was no room for anything else. He was prepared to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but unless he arrived at some internal change and a more realistic self-appraisal, the Smithers staff was not optimistic about Cheever’s chances. Few of them thought he would stay sober. They did not reckon with his strength of will or his delight in being alive. He went home to Cedar Lane, where everything was in bloom: “apples, dogwood, wisteria, lilac, me.”