Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  He lacked a “public personality” and the rewards that came with it, Cheever used to say, but with the Newsweek story he acquired one. To the public at large, he became the writer who had kicked alcohol and written a book about prison. In this new dispensation, he seemed to shake off his native Yankee reserve. In magazine interviews and television appearances he spoke openly about his terrible alcoholism, his troubled marriage, his conflicted relationship with his brother. Mail poured in from Newsweek readers and viewers of The Dick Cavett Show. At parties, even close to home, everyone wanted to talk to him and to shake his hand. In New York, people recognized him on the street, and not because they mistook him for David Wayne or Burgess Meredith. For the first time John Cheever became a famous man, and found that he liked it. Falconer also brought him a great deal of money. He had been almost broke when he finished the novel. The book sold very well, however, and Paramount spent forty thousand dollars for a movie option and then decided not to make the film. That was “the best of all possible worlds,” he said. “It was like finding money in the gutter.”

  “There are writers whose last novels are very like the first,” Saul Bellow remarked, but Cheever “was a writer of another sort, altogether … one of the self-transformers.” After Bullet Park, he knew, he had to find fresh subject matter and a new voice. He found them in Falconer, a book radically different in setting, style, and theme from anything he had yet written. Gone were the masterfully evoked backgrounds of upper-middle-class life—the New York apartment, the Yankee village, the exurban retreat. Instead the action takes place in Cellblock F of Falconer prison, where the protagonist, a drug addict and college professor named Ezekiel Farragut, has been confined for killing his brother, Eben, with a fire iron. For a cast of characters the Farquarsons and Merrills and Bentleys and Weeds of his earlier writing were replaced by prison inmates who were not allowed the dignity of last names: Chicken Number Two, a tattooed folk-singing jewel thief; Tennis, an airplane hijacker who wrongly expects to “leap the net” to freedom any week now; Cuckold, who finally “iced” his wife one night after she had betrayed him a hundred times. Presiding over this crew is the obese guard Tiny, who slaughters dozens of cats—prison population two thousand inmates, four thousand cats—after one makes off with his London broil. The people in the prison talk as they might be expected to: “fuck” is one of the basic verbs. And they are full of self-justifications and improbable claims of innocence.

  Yet in this unlikely environment Farragut somehow earns redemption. First, he kicks the heroin habit. Then he learns to love his fellowman—not only sexually, as in his affair with the young prisoner Jody, but compassionately, as when he cares for the bereft and dying Chicken Number Two. As Cheever often pointed out, the theme of the novel was confinement, and he used the word to signify social and psychological as well as physical restrictions. People could get stuck in elevators, trapped in airports, or locked into “sentimental or erotic contracts” that were extremely difficult to get out of. Even our homes, however much longed for, could make us captives. In that sense, he said, confinement had always been his subject. Falconer prison was his third “metaphor for confinement.” The first had been St. Botolphs, a New England village that constrained its natives through the appeal of traditional values and nostalgia, and the second the comfortable suburban town, like Bullet Park and Shady Hill. But he was far from advocating total freedom in Falconer. Like an astronaut, he reveled in periods of weightlessness, but knew he would soon yearn for gravity. Only through love could one escape his bonds.

  Falconer describes a new kind of love—a love without possessiveness that moves beyond eros to agape. To reach that ideal, Zeke Farragut must first rid himself of the cancer of self-hatred symbolized by his alter ego, Eben. The immediate cause of the fratricide is an argument in which Eben tells Zeke his father had tried to have him aborted. “Your own father wanted you to be killed,” he screams, and Farragut strikes him with the iron. When he kills his detestable brother, he truncates that part of himself that prefers no to yes, cynicism to belief, sorrow to joy, hate to love. The crime represents a necessary first step in his eventual redemption. In prison he fears that in loving Jody he is only loving himself, but in fact the affair teaches him how to love without tying down the loved one. Jody is the beloved in the relationship, and Farragut waits for him “as he had waited for the sound of Jane’s heels on the cobbles in Boston, waited for the sound of the elevator that would bring Virginia up to the eleventh floor, waited for Dodie to open the rusty gate in Thrace Street, waited for Roberta to get off the C bus in some Roman piazza.…” The difference is that when Jody is unfaithful—as he often is—Farragut feels no real pangs of jealousy. And when Jody miraculously escapes in a helicopter, Zeke misses him yet is genuinely glad for his freedom.

  “There is nothing on earth as cruel as a rotten marriage,” Farragut reflects, and his disastrous marriage to Marcia stands in sharp contrast to his love for Jody. “I don’t have to listen to your shit anymore,” his wife screams at him as he is about to be incarcerated. He is astonished not because she is hysterical but because she took the words out of his mouth. When she visits him in prison, she pulls her hand away from his touch, says that it’s been “nice to have a dry toilet seat” in his absence, observes that prison has turned his hair becomingly snow-white, and explains that she thinks it unwise to let him see his much-loved son Peter. “No one,” as John Gardner commented, “has ever written down a more deadly wife than Farragut’s.” She is every bit as hateful and murderous as his brother had been. In his quest for love, Farragut must look beyond holy matrimony.

  He achieves his redemption—and his own miraculous escape from Falconer—by caring for Chicken Number Two in his dying days. He takes the emaciated and pitiful Chicken into his cell, bathes him, and puts him to bed between clean sheets. He’s not at all afraid to die, Chicken says. He hates to leave the party, for “even franks and rice taste good when you’re hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch.” Yet he will die a happy man because, as he tells Zeke, he is “intensely interested in what’s going to happen next.” Zeke tenderly takes the old second-story man’s hand, and seems to draw from it “a deep sense of freeness … something that Chicken Number Two was lovingly giving to him.” Then he feels a slight discomfort in his buttocks and finds that he has been sitting on Chicken’s false teeth. “Oh, Chicken,” he says, “you bit me in the ass,” and his laughter turns to sobs as Chicken dies.

  The medics come, put Chicken in a shroud, and leave. Cunningly Farragut removes Chicken to his bed and takes his place in the shroud. By this means, reminiscent of The Count of Monte Cristo, he is delivered from prison. At the end, a stranger on a bus gives him a raincoat to protect him from the wet. As he alights from the bus, Farragut realizes that he has lost “his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature.” He walks in the rain, head high and back straight, rejoicing in his release.

  Cheever drew liberally on his own experience in the novel. His alcoholism supplied him with the authentic detail of withdrawal from addiction that Farragut suffers through, for example. Moreover, Farragut’s family situation closely resembles that of his creator. The dark underside of the self represented by the evil brother, the father who invited the abortionist to dinner, the mother who neglected him, the wife who scorned him—all these characters from his family background, real and imagined, are presented in exaggerated form in Falconer. Yet the novel goes far beyond these traces of autobiography, and it makes the most affirmative statement in all of Cheever’s work. Falconer is his testament that only love—selfless love, love for the least worthy and most flawed of our fellowmen—can make us free.

  Cheever was apprehensive about the reception of Falconer—he well remembered the devastating Sunday Times review of Bullet Park—but almost all of the reviews were favorable. Most welcomed Falconer as a substantial advance on Cheever’s previous work. One of the things a great writer can do in a mad time, John Gardner observed, is simply to wri
te down things as they are. And in Falconer Cheever “simply copied down reality at its fiercest, making no excuses.” Bellow reached much the same conclusion. The novel, he wrote Cheever, was “much the toughest book you ever wrote—warlike, nothing softened.” What he felt throughout was “an enraged determination to state the basic facts.” Joan Didion, praising the novel in the New York Times Book Review, emphasized that despite its dismal setting, Falconer nonetheless represented another chapter in Cheever’s ongoing concern with exile and estrangement. Joyce Carol Oates sounded the sole negative note. The victories in the novel came too easily, she maintained, and its transcendence of pain and misery seemed “glib.” Her critique echoed the old “New Yorker writer” stereotype of Cheever: that he was too graceful and brilliant, that he did not suffer convincingly enough on the page. Yet in Falconer he found new and more basic ways of expressing himself. “My prose is much closer to the substance,” he remarked in his interview with his daughter. “I’ve rid myself of persiflage. It’s like having a voice and finally finding the right music.” Most reviewers were disposed to agree with Margaret Manning of the Boston Sunday Globe that the only thing wrong with Falconer was that it had to end. “I wanted it to go on forever,” Manning wrote.

  To be sure, Cheever’s depiction of marriage in Falconer stretches the limits of believability. It may be that like Zeke’s brother, Eben, Marcia is supposed to symbolize some odious corner of himself that he must obliterate or at least escape in order to become healthy and whole. Yet the venom in the portrait unmistakably derives in part from Cheever’s own disturbed marriage. According to Fred, both of his parents seemed driven by perversity, “always going in opposite directions” and capable of saying terrible things to and about each other along the way. They were both highly articulate and unusually contrary people, as John himself admitted. Even standing next to each other at a party, they could manage to look estranged. At home they often kept their distance. When Dennis Coates or Allan Gurganus or Phil Schultz came to visit, Mary busied herself at the opposite end of the house. They were John’s protégés, after all, and she had her own life to live. She constructed a separate life of her own, with different friends, while sticking to the marriage with determination. In the process, Susan believes, her mother became “really autonomous.”

  Publicly, Cheever called the marriage vows “the most inspired and the most preposterous of all propositions.” In rural societies men and women might be bound for life because they had to work together to survive. But in modern life only “the imponderable of love” could bind a man and a woman, and in his view such love was “neither strong enough nor even enough in most cases to last a lifetime.” In their case, he told more than one interviewer, there had scarcely been a week during forty years together that he and Mary did not contemplate divorce.

  Despite what must have been the sting of reading and hearing her husband’s words on the subject, and despite his sexual philandering and jealousy, Mary Cheever stuck it out. They had bad times, she acknowledges, but “bad times make it easier to hang on for people like me because in bad times you know you have to hang in and help.” John’s life, she understood, lay in his writing. Her job was to take care of him, especially when he was in the depths. According to Aline Benjamin, who knew both Cheevers well, “Mary was a strong, loving, indomitable, and funny wife.” Almost always, they could laugh together. Once John brought her along to see the Ascoli farm and noticed a new chicken. “Where did it come from?” he asked John Bukovsky. “Oh, people drop them over the fence,” Bukovsky explained. It was an easy way to get rid of Easter chicks who had grown too big or troublesome or uncute to keep. “I bet you’d like to drop me over the fence sometimes,” John said to Mary.

  With Falconer successfully launched, Cheever was ready to move on to something different. He thought of his career as a journey or voyage, and there was no going back. But he did not yet know where the road might lead. While he waited for the next part of his literary journey to declare itself, he resumed his own restless wayfaring and attended to his ceremonial obligations.

  Elizabeth Ames died on March 28. The death certificate listed her age as ninety-two, but Malcolm Cowley suspected she was ninety-six and Cheever thought her ninety-nine. The last time John saw her at Yaddo, she sat in her chair fully dressed, with her handbag at her feet as if in a train station. Quite senile, she recognized Cheever but thought of him as the twenty-two-year-old she had first met in 1934. It was a pleasant visit, for he got her started telling stories about the old days. When they parted, she said she’d see him in Minneapolis—the city she had grown up in and left more than sixty years before. In recognition of the bond between them, Cheever was asked to speak at her memorial service in the music room at Yaddo. The audience included members of the Yaddo corporation, former artists who had been guests there, cooks and groundskeepers. With a gentle humor born of love, Cheever paid homage to her unusually useful and happy life. Even her senility was remarkable, he said at the end. “Well into her nineties she decided that the people she loved and admired—many of them long dead—were alive and working in the mansion. The fools and bores, she decided, were dead.”

  In June, Max Zimmer stopped at Cedar Lane on his way to Yaddo. He had driven forty-five hours straight through from Utah to New York, and was somewhat disoriented. Nor did he work well at Yaddo. He was put off by the rather genteel atmosphere of the place and by the pretensions of some of the guests. He was also annoyed to find that he was regarded as having been invited solely because of Cheever’s influence. He could and should have made it on his own, he felt. At Yaddo, however, he met Lewis Turco, poet and professor at the State College of New York at Oswego, and Turco offered him a job teaching creative writing at the college. He taught at Oswego from the fall of 1977 to the spring of 1979. During this period Max was first married to a young woman studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and then divorced. He saw Cheever only three or four times a year, but was ever assured in conversation and correspondence of John’s love for him.

  Late in the spring, Cheever traveled to Bulgaria to attend an international conference titled “The Writer and Peace: The Spirit of Helsinki and the Duty of the Masters of Culture.” The American participants—William Saroyan and Gore Vidal in addition to Cheever—had been recruited by Lyubomir Levchev, a charming Bulgarian poet and first deputy chairman of his government’s committee on art and culture, during a whirlwind visit to the United States in late January and early February. Cheever was repeatedly advised not to make the trip. Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark thought he was “almost criminally naive” to validate such a repressive regime by his presence. Amnesty International sent him lists of Eastern European writers recently thrown in jail. Tanya Litvinov, living in London, strongly advised him not to go. But he believed, as he told Raphael Rudnik, that any art that was any good was by its nature heretical, and to expose any people to art was therefore to act against a totalitarian state.

  Mary Cheever accompanied her husband on the Bulgarian trip. First they stopped in the Netherlands, to visit the Rudniks. On June 4, Cheever gave a highly successful reading at the United States Information Service Center in Amsterdam and delighted the American ambassador and others by refusing an honorarium. Then it was on to Bulgaria, where the conference turned into the expected “love feast, stage-managed from opening speeches of self-congratulation to final resolutions on peace.” The American writers were unanimous in thinking that as political propaganda the gathering was ineffective. The Russian delegates, including Yevtushenko and Vosnesensky, virtually surrounded the Americans, cutting off their access to writers from other countries. And press reports were so carefully manipulated that the reporter from Le Monde returned to Paris after the first day of the three-day meeting.

  As envoys of goodwill, however, the hosts could hardly have been more ingratiating. There were elaborate dinners “and always,” Cheever observed, “a string trio in long gold dresses.” Saroyan’s work was well known in Eastern Europe, his
plays often performed. “If this bus overturns,” Vidal said during an outing, “Saroyan is the only one the Bulgarian papers will feature.” On the return trip to the United States the Cheevers changed planes in Frankfurt, and Denny Coates—stationed in Germany—tracked them down at the airport. He found Cheever standing in line, wearing the rattiest, dirtiest raincoat he had ever seen. As they chatted together, Coates spied a familiar face half a dozen places away in line. It was Mary, of course, and he went to greet her, then came back to resume talking with John. They were traveling on the same plane, but not really together.

  Cheever spent two weeks of the summer signing copies of the Franklin Library’s special edition of The Wapshot Chronicle. The Franklin people offered to dispatch him to any island in the world to perform this chore, doubtless expecting him to opt for Bali. He chose Nantucket instead, where he and Mary stayed at the Wauwinet House, which they knew well from other visits. He spent part of each day at his desk, writing his name in the books and trying to hold the pen at the angle recommended to avoid hand fatigue. Such were the penalties of fame. The benefits worked out to two dollars a signature.

  He also went to Yaddo, more to see Max than to write. It was obvious, Grace Schulman remembers, that he was in love with Max, but the reunion went badly. When Max moved to Oswego in the fall, Cheever began a relationship with Steve Phillips (not his real name), one of his former students at Boston University. This liaison was not as intense as that between Cheever and Zimmer. Steve occasionally came to Ossining, and the two of them would bicycle along the aqueduct to the Croton dam or drive off to lunch together. On these occasions Cheever commented wittily on books and authors for the benefit of the aspiring young author. In return Phillips gave him the intimacy he required. “Brightness falls from the air” was the Joycean refrain that ran through John’s head after their meetings. It was “a summons to life.” Both of them were content to keep the affair easygoing. Cheever, perhaps thinking of Max, worried about its becoming a relationship whose every parting would seem intolerable.