Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  As with Max, he saw to it that Steve had more than enough to drink and smoke. Sometimes Phillips ended up back in Grand Central Station barely able to drag himself off the train. Cheever seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in watching these young men drink. And liquor functioned to relax inhibitions, even for the entirely sober Cheever. He remained agonizingly ambivalent about his homosexual desires, and unwilling to declare them overtly. He liked cultivating an air of illicit intrigue, Phillips thought, but sometimes this led to awkwardness. Once the two of them were biking together when John spied some friends in the distance. “You go on ahead,” he told Steve, and stopped to talk with the friends as if he and Steve had not been companions at all. At times his needs overcame him. When he went into New York to see Ned Rorem, for example, he became embarrassingly insistent almost at once. Ned escaped him, but then Rorem’s companion James Holmes came in and Cheever transferred his attentions. After that, he saw Holmes occasionally for backgammon or lunch at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, where John seemed to be in his element. It was not a fulfilling friendship, however. Holmes thought him childishly self-centered in his attitude toward sex.

  During the fall of 1977, Cheever was persuaded by David Clarke, a visiting scholar at Yale, to write a piece about architectural preservation. Clarke asked Cheever to undertake the job because he admired the way he characterized places in his fiction. Shady Hill and St. Botolphs were so vividly presented, he thought, that like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex they came to function as characters in his fiction. Pleased by that observation, Cheever dashed off a brief essay titled “The Second Most Exalted of the Arts” for the Journal of Architectural Education. The burden of his message was that most contemporary buildings would hardly deserve preservation. Architecture revealed the character of the architect, he observed, and current housing developments and motel projects proclaimed nothing so loudly as the avariciousness and stupidity of those who designed and built them. He was also distressed by the incursion of Route 9A on his own property, where it cut within thirty-five feet of his apple orchard. He reposed his hope in the independence and pride of individual craftsmen. On his way to church one Sunday morning, he spied a lone workman on the roof. “Something has to be done right,” the Sabbath laborer told him, and he was doing it on his own time.

  In November he broke off his long professional alliance with Candida Donadio, a separation that caused both author and agent some pain. In a parting letter of regret, Cheever thanked her for her faith in Falconer and for seeing him through some difficult times. Nonetheless he severed the tie, and before hiring another agent tried to handle his literary business by himself, with dubious success. In July 1978, for instance, he turned down a request from X. J. Kennedy to include “The Swimmer” in his popular Little, Brown textbook An Introduction to Fiction, and so made that magnificent story unavailable to hundreds of thousands of college students. He was overwhelmed by such requests, he told Kennedy by way of explanation, with “no agent, no secretary.”

  The last months of 1977 were punctuated by a series of public appearances and hometown awards. The Reformed synagogue in Chappaqua named Cheever Man of the Year. He and Mary were honored by the Ossining public library. He paid a return visit to Iowa for a reading and a workshop session. Once again he went to Harvard to read on behalf of the Advocate, except that this time the magazine charged a two-dollar fee for the right to witness the author of Falconer. The following day he wowed the students at Bradford, brightening everyone’s day with his “warmth, wit, and boundless laughter.” He appeared at a mass benefit reading in Alice Tully Hall, performing after John Ashbery and Donald Barthelme and before Richard Eberhart, Allen Ginsberg, and Eugene McCarthy, among others. Phil Schultz prevailed on him to read at the YM-YWHA in New York to an overflow audience. Grace Schulman threw a party afterward at her University Place apartment in Greenwich Village. John and Mary’s friends attended, the men in business suits and the women in high collars and hats. It seemed to Schulman as if a nineteenth-century soirée had been transplanted to the avant-garde precincts of the Village.

  After the new year the Cheevers were off on another overseas journey, her first and his third trip to the Soviet Union. In a kind of perverse preparation they dined with the Romanovs in mid-December. “My grandmother sent a battleship for me,” Vassily said in explaining how he survived the revolution. In Moscow two weeks later, they were met by Frieda Lurie, a colonel in the KGB and a Russian of another color. Cheever’s third Russian sojourn was not as auspicious as the others. He came back exhausted; Mary acquired a stomach parasite it took months to purge. The trip was not without its moments, however. The Novgorod high school band greeted them with a version of “Hold That Tiger.” As always Cheever was impressed by the serious attention paid to writers. They treated him, he told Dick Cavett in a television interview, with as much respect as an investment banker commanded in the United States.

  Cheever readjusted to Western time and customs at Yaddo. He was sometimes rude at dinner to those who betrayed the least trace of pretentiousness, Hayden Carruth noted. But he also renewed his old friendship with cook Nellie Shannon and watched Little House on the Prairie with caretakers George and Helen Vincent. Afternoons he and Carruth skied the seven-mile cross-country course twice over. At first Cheever had trouble keeping up with Carruth, ten years his junior, but by the end of a week he was staying with him and even pushing the pace. Neither of them was getting much writing done.

  Much of Cheever’s time was spent answering the correspondence that came in from those lonely and intelligent readers, unassociated with journalism or publishing or academia, that he welcomed as his ideal audience. He did not save their letters. He saved no one’s letters, for “saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss.” But he faithfully and promptly answered them, usually on the same day they arrived. He was also busy with the organizational and ceremonial duties that devolved upon him in his growing eminence. In 1977 he was elected to the board of the American Academy; by 1978 he was serving as secretary of that august body. The academy called on him, in May 1977, to present Saul Bellow with its gold medal. Then in February 1978 he and Bernard Malamud were asked to make laudatory remarks when the National Arts Club awarded Bellow its gold medal. That made two gold medals in nine months, and later he was to bestow still other honors on his friend Saul. At the academy ceremony, Cheever commented on the “genuine brilliance and civility” with which Bellow had faced the hullaballoo surrounding the Nobel Prize. At the National Arts Club dinner, he called Bellow “the master of his time” and singled out The Adventures of Augie March, particularly, as a book that “has stayed with me all of my days.”

  Much has been written about the competitiveness of writers, yet as Eileen Simpson wondered in connection with John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, were poets really “more competitive than astronauts, art collectors, assistant professors, jockeys, hostesses, ballet dancers, professional beauties?” In Cheever’s case he was subject to twinges of resentment when authors he regarded as inferior were honored out of proportion to their accomplishment. He felt nothing of the sort, however, with respect to the writers—Saul Bellow and John Updike among them—whose work he most valued. Among the three of them and such others as Malamud and Robert Penn Warren there grew up a kind of fellowship that made rivalry seem ridiculous.

  Cheever and Bellow first met in Eleanor Clark’s railroad apartment in New York, shortly after World War II. From the beginning there was mutual admiration between them, and it lasted. Bellow repeatedly placed Cheever atop lists of writers he admired, citing his extraordinary “sleight-of-hand.” As for Cheever, he had thought Bellow the most interesting writer he knew since first reading his description of a woman washing window glass in the 1944 Dangling Man. In reading Bellow, Cheever sensed a spirit of brotherhood. “We share not only our love of women but a fondness for rain.” The affinity extended beyond the fiction to the authors themselves. A real friendship sprang up between t
hem, though they saw each other infrequently. “On both sides there was instant candor,” Bellow said. Nothing was held back behind costumes or masks. The very difference in their backgrounds—the Yankee prep schooler versus the son of Jewish immigrants—seemed to tie them together, because both proceeded beyond their origins to become, more simply and importantly, American writers. Toward Bellow, Cheever displayed none of the snobbery of certain Yankee WASPs. Instead, Bellow observed, he put “human essences in the first place: first the persons—himself, myself—and after that the other stuff, class origins, social history.” Once Cheever told him that if he had the choice, he would wish to be born the child of Jewish immigrants in the United States. That might bring them closer together.

  As writers, though, what counted was not where they came from but where they let their writing take them. And Cheever, Bellow felt, had transformed himself through his fiction, growing and developing in the process. It was what he aimed to do himself and gave them a commonality of purpose shared by few others. “I felt connected with John,” he said emphatically.

  The tie between Cheever and Updike was complicated by the public tendency to confuse the two writers and their work. Cheever was sometimes put off when an acquaintance would say how much he or she admired his latest book—“Rabbit Redux, wasn’t it?” Once he was actually invited to do a reading at Notre Dame by a professor who complimented him on the masterful “Maple stories.” Updike was the victim of similar mistakes, and he cannot have been pleased by the bad pun that characterized him as an under- or an over-a-Cheever. Yet there was mutual respect between them from the time Updike wrote Cheever a fan letter about the hang of Cousin Honora’s dress and Cheever recognized the unmistakable indications of genius in Updike’s first work. “He’s a winner,” Cheever invariably said of the writer who was nearly twenty years his junior. He admired Updike’s willingness to take chances in his fiction and his capacity to move easily from story and novel to essay and poem. They were in fact “colleagues,” just as Cheever had said in response to the false report of Updike’s death, and that collegiality gave their friendship an importance out of all proportion to the rare occasions on which they met. In 1977, John and Mary Cheever drove to Boston for Liz Updike’s wedding. He would have gone to Korea to see Liz married, Cheever wrote Updike afterward. Such ceremonies enabled him to recognize the bond between them.

  At another significant ceremony in June 1978, Cheever was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard. “A master chronicler of his times,” the citation read, “he perceives in the American suburb a microcosm of the divisions, tensions, and incongruous ecstasies of twentieth-century life.” The recognition meant more to him than to most. He was undoubtedly the only recipient that year whose academic career had ended with his expulsion from prep school. The other honorees included the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ephraim Katzir, the former president of Israel. “Did you graduate from Harvard?” Madame Katzir innocently asked Cheever. No, Cheever replied, nor from high school either. He’d spent most of what might have been his college years, he said, in furnished rooms on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, cold and hungry and lonely.

  “Ah,” Madame Katzir said, “but that’s all behind you.”

  “No,” said Cheever. “I’m not sure that it is.”

  At sixty-six, he might soon be on his own again, he hinted. The overseas trips with Mary were over. Now he traveled alone, or with others. In the summer of 1978, he visited Bulgaria again and took Ben and Linda along. According to Ben, he apparently had an affair with his interpreter on this journey, a young woman named Andrea. He insisted on Andrea’s accompanying them on a trip to Varna, on the Black Sea. There he arranged a champagne-and-caviar celebration in honor of her birthday. The next day, Ben and Linda saw the two of them sunning on the beach in casual intimacy, Andrea topless. It seemed clear that they had spent the night together.

  In the fall he was on the reading circuit again, this time on a tour of Canadian cities for the State Department. Word came in October that Susan, who had been spending a year in France for that purpose, had finished her first novel, later published as Looking for Work. He was proud of her, John wrote: completing a novel was a great accomplishment. He was happy that Susie was not ashamed of being the daughter of a novelist, and that she had not resorted to crypto-autobiography. In her book, he pointed out, the father rode to hounds and parted his hair in the middle. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with a center part,” he said. He was even gladder that she hadn’t taken a couple of years off waiting tables in Aspen to find herself. She “knows damn well” who she is and what she wants to do, he observed with approval.

  At the end of October, Knopf brought out The Stories of John Cheever, a comprehensive collection of sixty-one of Cheever’s stories. The book was a triumph, but it might not have existed at all but for the foresight of Bob Gottlieb. When Gottlieb first proposed the collection, Cheever resisted the idea. Almost all the stories had already appeared in both magazine and book form. “Who’s going to buy a book just to read them again?” he argued. But Gottlieb saw the potential of a large volume of stories after the success of Falconer. Moreover, he did most of the work in putting the book together. All Cheever did was “pull the stories out from under the bed.” Gottlieb read through them, made his choices in consultation with Cheever, and worked out a tentative table of contents. The result was a brilliant assemblage of the best of Cheever, with some significant omissions among his early work and such other stories as the autobiographical “The National Pastime” and the explicitly homosexual “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish, and the Bear.” The stories were presented mostly in chronological order of composition. Cheever decided to lead off, however, with the masterly “Goodbye, My Brother” (1951), though several other stories in the book were written earlier.

  The Stories of John Cheever, nearly seven hundred pages in its bold red jacket, had about it the atmosphere of a magnum opus, a valedictory statement from a writer approaching the end of his threescore and ten. To the general reader and even to reviewers who should have known better, the book came as a surprise. Few realized how many excellent stories Cheever had written, or how many in different keys: some dark, some light, some “written from the outside” in an ironic tone, some “written from the inside” and illuminated by the sunny vision of the narrator, some realistic, some magical. Most of the reviews were ecstatic. “John Cheever is a magnificent storyteller,” Anne Tyler advised, “and this is a dazzling and powerful book.” The appearance of Cheever’s Stories, John Leonard asserted, was “not merely the publishing event of the ‘season’ but a grand occasion in English literature.” Cheever was “one of the two or three most imaginative and acrobatic literary artists now alive,” Stephen Becker proclaimed. Commercially, the book did extremely well. The local Books ’n Things store in Briarcliff sold almost nine hundred hardcover copies at a book-signing party, and sales were high throughout the nation. His new agent, Lynn Nesbit at ICM, negotiated a five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance from Knopf toward his next two books. He had no need ever to feel poor again.

  Cheever welcomed the recognition as much as the money, and for good reason. Early in 1978 his name had been left off a list of three nominees for the American Academy–National Institute Gold Medal in the Short Story. The names submitted to the members were Mary McCarthy, Peter Taylor, and John Updike, distinguished artists all (Taylor won), with Cheever conspicuously absent. His name had come up in the deliberations, and was then dropped on the grounds that he had already received the Howells Medal for the novel from the organization and it was time to recognize someone else. Bill Maxwell propounded this view to the other members of the nominating committee, and it carried the day. To some extent, Maxwell was simply stating what he believed—that it was a good idea to spread the honors around—but he was also motivated by Cheever’s ill-spirited remarks about him.

  He was particularly incensed by the “Telephone Story”—the tale circulated by Cheever in newspaper and televis
ion interviews. In one version of the story, Maxwell recalls, Cheever said he had come to see his editor back in the mid-1950s when he was dead broke and asked if the editor would give him some money in exchange for a share in the royalties of the as yet unpublished Wapshot Chronicle. The editor supposedly offered him three thousand dollars, and when Cheever asked if he couldn’t make it a little more, picked up the telephone and held it toward him, as if to say, “See if you can do better anywhere else.” No one who knew the gentlemanly Maxwell was likely to take that story seriously, but nonetheless it angered him. “Why should I further John’s career when he tells those whoppers about me?” he thought. His part in this decision, Maxwell acknowledges, has subsequently “remained somewhat on my conscience. Maybe more than somewhat.” For the fact was that he thought Cheever the best short-story writer in America.

  Malcolm Cowley, another who felt the same way, was outraged at not finding Cheever’s name on the ballot circulated to members, and conducted a behind-the-scenes correspondence among officers of the American Academy–National Institute chastising them for letting such an oversight come to pass. Cheever would have been a shoo-in had his name been proposed, Cowley thought, and there was plenty of precedent for awarding the gold medal to those who had already won the Howells. Faulkner had been so honored, as had Cather and Welty. Naturally disappointed, Cheever insisted that he wasn’t. He would much rather have written “The Swimmer,” he said, medal or no medal. Still, it must have seemed something like a vindication when The Stories of John Cheever received both the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for 1978, while narrowly missing the National Book Award.