by Colm Toibin
We have our ice cream on the back lawn, read, play whist, wish on the evening star for a gold watch and chain, kiss one another goodnight, and go to bed. These seemed to be the beginnings of a world, these days all seemed like mornings, and if there was a single incident that could be used as a turning point it was, I suppose, when my father went out to play an early game of golf and found a dear friend and business associate on the edge of the third fairway hanging dead from a tree.
The tone in Cheever’s journals was usually self-pitying and humourless. In the stories, however, he could turn domestic despair into comedy and then back again, often in a single phrase. Neddy in ‘The Swimmer’, for example, Cheever wrote, ‘might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one’. Or in ‘The Country Husband’, as the children are bickering in their father’s presence before their mother enters to announce that supper is ready in their nice suburban house, Cheever risks a phrase that makes you unsure whether to laugh or cry: ‘She strikes a match and lights the six candles in this vale of tears.’
For Cheever, the house, the simple suburban house, was a sort of hell. Yet this was where he lived, and the idea of losing it, or being left alone in it, was a further depth of hell that he dreaded. In his journal for 1963 he brooded over this:
My grandfather is supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a halfwit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly and forsaken places yearning for a house, a wife, the voices of my sons, and having all of this I find myself, when I am engorged with petulance, thinking that after all, after the Easter egg hunts and the merry singing at Christmas, after the loving and the surprises and the summer afternoons, after the laughter and the open fires, I will end up cold, alone, dishonoured, forgotten by my children, an old man approaching death without a companion.
Cheever had another problem besides his fear that his secret sexuality would be discovered and that he would lose the cocoon of domestic life that left him so blissfully unhappy. He was a snob. He believed that he was a Cheever and that this meant something, that he belonged in some way to American grandeur. Thus his social status in the suburbs mattered to him, as did material wealth and its trappings, even when he did not have them. The decline in fortune suffered by his parents and the drunken antics of his brother, their letting the family name down, filled him with as much shame as his own sexuality or his own drinking. In company he could be suave and charming, but the minute he was alone and putting pen to paper, this shame and its attendant dramas would make its way into his fiction and his journals in guises both comic and maudlin. He was aware, as were others, of his ‘cultivated accent’ – his daughter, Susan, reported her friends asking if he was English or something – and noted that he should be careful with it. ‘When this gets into my prose, my prose is at its worst.’
The first Cheever in America was Ezekiel, who was headmaster of the Boston Latin School from 1671 to 1708, and the author of a book on Latin that was the standard textbook in the United States for more than a century. On his mother’s side, Cheever claimed to be descended from Sir Percy Devereaux, a mayor of Windsor: indeed, his mother kept a picture of Windsor Castle on her wall. But this was nonsense; he had no such ancestor. When Cheever’s family wanted to mock him, they referred to him as the Lost Earl of Devereaux. His mother was a nurse; he gave some of her characteristics, such as her interest in organizing others, to Honora Wapshot in his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. Like Coverly Wapshot, Cheever blamed his mother for handing on some of her worst anxieties to him. His father was a shoe salesman.
In his early forties, after winning an O. Henry Award, Cheever went to see his mother. He reported the following exchange: ‘I read in the newspaper that you won a prize.’ ‘Yes, mother, I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t terribly important to me.’ ‘No, it wasn’t to me either.’ In the Wapshot novels, everybody loves Coverly’s older brother, Moses, but ‘everybody did not love Coverly’. So, too, everyone loved Fred, John Cheever’s older brother, who was born in 1905, but everybody did not love John, who was born in 1912. By the time his mother was pregnant with him, indeed, the marriage was under so much strain that Cheever’s father invited an abortionist to dinner. As Blake Bailey writes in his biography: ‘It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life … Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode.’
The family was affluent at first, living in a large house in Quincy, Massachusetts, but by the 1920s, as the Depression came to New England, Cheever’s father’s business failed and he began crying at the breakfast table. Fred was the strong one and excelled at sport whereas John was weak and prone to illness.Fred defended him, however, punching an Irishman who said that his little brother looked like a girl when he skated. Cheever opened his story ‘The National Pastime’: ‘To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.’ His uncle, when he saw him, said: ‘Well, I guess you could play tennis.’ Cheever covered his tracks by hating tennis all his life and developing an elaborate and conspicuous interest in sport, including baseball. ‘He flung himself into icy pools and skated with a masculine swagger,’ Bailey writes. While Fred was away at college, John also developed an interest in other pastimes, such as attending ‘a penis-measuring contest, followed by an orgy’ and soon learning to masturbate with a boy called Fax Ogden. ‘Rainy days were best of all,’ Bailey writes, ‘as the two boys could stay in bed and practise, indefatigably, their favourite pastime.’ Cheever wrote in an unpublished memoir that ‘when one bed got gummed up we used to move to another’.
Cheever was good at blaming people; so skilled did he become at it that he sometimes went as far as blaming himself. Since he never had a job or went out much, and mainly saw his family and his family only, he specialized in blaming them. He blamed his father and his brother for not playing ball with him when he was small. He blamed his father for losing his money, his brother for leaving home. He blamed his mother for many things, but principally for opening a giftshop to keep the family going and making a success of it. Once she opened the shop, Cheever wrote, ‘I was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely: “Is there something I can do for you?” ’ The vulgarity of it all was an ‘abysmal humiliation’ for him. When he read Freud, Cheever also discovered that his family was a ‘virtual paradigm for “that chain of relationships” (weak father, dominant mother) “that usually produces a male homosexual” ’. Thus they didn’t just make him poor, they made him queer, and he spent the rest of his life resenting them.
Since home did not suit his tastes, Cheever invented an alternative and much grander home – the artists’ retreat at Yaddo in upstate New York, where he first went when he was twenty-two. He seems to have enjoyed himself immensely there over the years. ‘It’s the only place I’ve ever felt at home,’ he said. In 1977 he reminisced: ‘I have been sucked by Ned [Rorem] and others in almost every room and tried unsuccessfully to mount a young man on the bridge between the lakes.’ Soon, despite this, or because of it, he became a favourite of Mrs Ames, who ran the place, and of the servants, who called him Lord Fauntleroy. (‘Only dogs, servants and children know who the real aristocrats are,’ he liked to say.) One of his happiest memories was returning to Yaddo and overhearing the parlourmaid say: ‘Master John is back!’
Cheever’s early stories deal with the nuclear family as a crucible of tension and betrayal; his families drink together and manage to cause each other nothing but pain. He became a master of the single, searing image of pure desolation in the midst of the trappings of good cheer and middle-class comfort. Because of his drinking habits and also because his talent seemed to focus best on the small m
oment of intense truth, he had real difficulty writing his first two novels. When he was forty, he gave 100 pages of a novel to the editor who had commissioned it to be told that they were worthless, that he should give up writing and look for another way of making a living. Although The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964) were well received and have their comic moments, there is something unfocused about the narratives and sketchy about the characters. As he came to the end of The Wapshot Scandal he wrote in his journal: ‘I cannot resolve the book because I have been irresolute about my own affairs.’
This is an interesting understatement, but it was maybe as far as he could go. And it is a fascinating idea that his talent could thrive using the sharp system of the story, but he struggled so much with the novels simply because there were vast areas of himself that he could not use as a basis for a character dramatized over time. In his stories he could create a tragic, trapped individual in a single scene or moment; he had a deep knowledge of what that was like. In his two Wapshot novels, using broad strokes, he managed merely a comic family down on their luck.
The problem was partly his intense inhabiting of the domestic sphere and the suburban landscape, as though this were a way of shutting out the wider world, and partly his refusal even to recognize his own homosexuality as anything other than a dark hidden area of the self that could not be explored. ‘For Cheever it would always be one thing to have sex with a man,’ Bailey writes, ‘another to spend the night with him. The latter was a taboo he would rarely if ever violate until a ripe old age.’ In his journals he wrote: ‘If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’ One of his best friends in his twenties was Malcolm Cowley, through whom he had briefly met Hart Crane. (It was Cowley’s wife that had been on the ship with Crane when he committed suicide in 1932.) A homosexual lifestyle, Cowley had warned Cheever, ‘could only end with drunkenness and ghastly suicide’. As one of Cheever’s colleagues in the Signal Corps in the Second World War remarked: ‘He wanted to be accepted as a New England gentleman and New England gentlemen aren’t gay. Back then you have no idea of the opprobrium. Even in the Signal Corps, even in the film and theatre world, you were a second-class citizen if you were gay, and Cheever did not want to be that.’
By the time he joined the Signal Corps, Cheever was married and his wife was pregnant. In 1952, in one of the earliest entries in his journal, Cheever wrote:
I can remember walking around the streets of New York on a summer night some years ago. I cannot say that it was like the pain of living death; it never had that clear a meaning. But it was torment, crushing torment and frustration. I was caught under the weight of some great door. The feeling always was that if I could express myself erotically I should come alive.
Later, Mary Cheever would report that she knew that there was something wrong with the sexual aspects of her marriage. ‘I sensed that he wasn’t entirely masculine.’ When asked if she discussed it with Cheever, she said: ‘Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.’
Cheever didn’t like homosexuals. ‘Their funny clothes and their peculiar smells and airs and scraps of French’ struck him as ‘an obscenity and a threat’. Having struggled to remain monogamous (and heterosexual) for almost twenty years, he noticed a change coming. When he saw Gore Vidal on TV in the early 1960s he thought him ‘personable and intelligent’ and then wrote: ‘I think that he is either not a fairy or that perhaps we have reached a point where men of this persuasion are not forced into attitudes of bitterness, rancour and despair.’ Soon afterwards, Cheever noted more men of his persuasion in a diner. ‘I think there is a fag beside me at the lunch counter,’ he wrote. ‘He drums his nails impatiently and who but a fag would do this?’ He prayed for the surf to wash such people away. In 1960, nineteen years after his marriage, he spent a night with Calvin Kentfield, a writer he had met at Yaddo a decade earlier. He noted in his journal:
I spend the night with C., and what do I make of this? I seem unashamed, and yet I feel or apprehend the weight of social strictures, the threat of punishment. But I have acted only on my own instincts, tried, discreetly, to relieve my drunken loneliness, my troublesome hunger for sexual tenderness. Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life. I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.
In 1964 Cheever invited the writer Paul Moor, who was a fan of his work, up to his hotel room in Berlin. ‘I think he was or may be a homosexual,’ he wrote to a friend about Moor. ‘This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too deep.’ Later he wrote in a letter: ‘I would like to live in a world in which there are no homosexuals but I suppose Paradise is thronged with them.’ Cheever at this stage was fifty-two. Most of his observations about homosexuals are unusual perhaps in that he wrote them down and then did not want them destroyed after he died. But they were not unusual as ways for a married man who was gay to keep the world at arm’s length by pretending, even if just as a brief respite, that other homosexuals were queer, while he just happened to like having sex with men. (Even in his late sixties Cheever barely tolerated this aspect of himself, and did not tolerate it at all in others. When an old friend confided that he, too, had had gay encounters, Cheever wrote in his journal: ‘I decided, before he had completed the sentence, that I would never see him again as a friend and I never did.’)
Just as it is important to place Cheever’s diaries and what would later become known as his self-loathing in its historical context, it might also help if we did the same with his drinking. But even in the context of the time, he was drinking a lot. Bailey reports on his moods and phases as a drunk:
There was Cheever the antic, happy drunk, who one night in 1946 danced the ‘atomic waltz’ with Howard Fast’s wife, Betty, on his shoulders, until she put out a cigarette in his ear and he flung her to the floor. There was Cheever the mean drunk, whose dry wit would suddenly turn vicious at some vague point … And finally – more and more often – there was Cheever the bored and even boring drunk, pickled by the long day’s drinking and wishing only for bed.
In the late 1950s, his brother Fred had to be hospitalized for ‘alcoholic malnutrition’. ‘Alarmed that his brother’s fate could prove to be his own,’ Bailey writes, ‘John pored over his journal and was appalled by the obviously “progressive” nature of his disease.’ He looked up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, he wrote in his journals: ‘Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.’
‘My God, the suburbs!’ Cheever wrote in 1960. ‘They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in The New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.’ By this time he had been living in the suburbs for almost a decade, having moved in 1951 to Scarborough (with his wife, his daughter, Susan, born in 1943, and son Ben, born in 1948) and then in 1961 to a large house in Ossining, where he was to live for the rest of his life. His third child, Federico, was born in 1957 in Rome, during a family sojourn there paid for by MGM’s purchase of the rights to one of his stories for $25,000.
Cheever’s relationship with his children was very close and mostly difficult, partly because he had nothing much to do all day except lounge around looking at them in a state of half-inebriation and total dissatisfaction. Towards the end of his life, he told colleagues th
at once, after a row with his wife, he woke to find a message written in lipstick by his daughter on the bathroom mirror: ‘Dere daddy, don’t leave us.’ When it was pointed out that such a scene occurs in his story ‘The Chimera’, with the same misspelling, Cheever replied: ‘Everything I write is autobiographical.’ But this was not so. Like a lot of writers, everything he wrote had a basis in autobiography and another in wishful or dreamy thinking. His daughter later denied that the scene took place: ‘I know how to spell,’ Susan Cheever said, ‘and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So “don’t leave us”? That was never the fear.’
‘Cheever,’ Bailey writes, ‘loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl”.’ As she was growing up, her father was a nightmare. ‘I defied my father’s fantasies,’ she wrote in her memoir, Home before Dark. ‘As an adolescent I was dumpy, plagued by acne, slumped over, and alternately shy and aggressive, and my lank straight brown hair was always in my eyes.’ When she invited boyfriends home, Cheever was not helpful. ‘He liked to invite my boyfriends off with him to go scything in the meadow or work on a felled tree with the chainsaw or clear some brush out behind the pine trees. I don’t know what happened out there, but they always came back in a rage.’ With his older son, he was almost worse. Ben, Bailey writes, was
now old enough to be a considerable disappointment in his own right: as his father was at pains to remind him, he too needed to lose weight and do better in school and (especially) take an interest in sports like other boys … Cheever, a great reader of Freud, was not consoled by the news that homosexual tendencies are somewhat innate in all people; rather he became even more vigilant in cultivating a proper ethos for his older son. ‘Speak like a man!’ he’d say, driven up the wall by the boy’s high-pitched voice, not to mention his giggling (‘You laugh like a woman!’).
