New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  Cheever picked on one of his son’s friends whom he thought was effeminate. The boy, he wrote, ‘often stands with both hands on his hips in an attitude that I was told, when I was a boy, was the sign of a congenital queer … He is attached securely to my son and I do not like him.’

  Cheever’s view of other writers was not sweet either. He wrote to a friend about John Updike: ‘I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.’ (Updike, when he read this remark in Cheever’s published letters in 1994, returned the compliment, when he described his feelings about Cheever’s drinking: ‘I felt badly because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted. Although the covetousness in me, and stony heart, kind of rejoiced to see one less writer to compete with.’) In 1965 Cheever (who, unlike some of his fellow writers, was not boycotting the White House) managed to heckle Updike as he read a story at a reception there. ‘The arrogance of Updike goes back to the fact that he does not consider me a peer,’ he wrote in his journals, bitterly noting that Updike considered Salinger a peer.

  Out of all this hate and resentment and foolishness, two figures escaped. One was Cheever’s younger son, Federico, and the other was Saul Bellow. Cheever seems to have liked both of them; or both of them had worked out a way to evade the daily spite he directed at all others, including his editor at the New Yorker, William Maxwell, who, he noted, bored him stiff. Federico got on with his father by not taking him seriously, by becoming his kid brother rather than his son, and then slowly becoming his father’s protector. ‘More and more,’ Bailey writes, ‘Federico had become the father and John the wayward boy: the latter had to be told not to swim naked in other people’s pools, not to use the chainsaw when drunk – on and on – while the former patiently absorbed the insults Cheever inflicted on whosoever presumed to look after him.’

  When Cheever met Bellow in the early 1950s he felt an instant rapport with him. ‘I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte,’ he wrote. ‘I loved him,’ Bellow said in return, and added that Cheever had not tried Yankee condescension on him. ‘It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.’

  When she read that Cheever said of Bellow, ‘we share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain’, Mary Cheever remarked: ‘They were both women haters.’ Certainly, most of the time, Cheever hated his wife. As the position of women in America began to change, and Mary Cheever developed independent views and ambitions, her husband’s temper was not improved. ‘Educating an unintellectual woman,’ he remarked, ‘is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. She cannot add a column of figures or make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns.’ His hatred for his wife disfigured some of his stories, including ‘An Educated American Woman’ (1963) and ‘The Ocean’ (1964). (He conceded that his depiction of ‘predatory women’ was a ‘serious weakness’ in his work.) ‘An Educated American Woman’ is perhaps the best account we have of how frightened American men were by the possibility that their wives would be anything other than little homemakers.

  Just as the position of women was changing in America, so, too, the prejudice against homosexuals was fading. While Cheever was threatened by the former, it was obvious that the latter would have a profound effect on him once he left his own house in Ossining and took a look at the world. In 1973, when he began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had T. C. Boyle, Ron Hansen and Allan Gurganus as students. Not only were these talented young writers, but one of them – Gurganus – was extremely handsome (as the photograph included in Bailey’s biography makes abundantly clear) and, as Bailey puts it, ‘quite insouciantly gay’. As Cheever admired Gurganus’s work (and introduced him to Maxwell, who published one of his stories), he presumed that Gurganus would return the compliment by sleeping with him, despite the fact that he was almost fifteen years older than Gurganus’s father. Some of his letters to Gurganus were playful, including the one where he asked (in return for the Maxwell introduction) for some favours. ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’ Gurganus let him know as sweetly as he could that while he liked him, he did not want to sleep with him. ‘How dare he refuse me in favour of some dimwitted major in decorative arts,’ Cheever wrote. He asked Gurganus to consider whether such figures ‘appreciate the excellence of your character and the fineness of your mind’.

  What Cheever was really looking for, as Gurganus put it, was ‘somebody who was literary, intelligent, attractive and manly, but gay on a technicality’. Early in 1977, at the University of Utah, he met Max Zimmer, a PhD candidate in his early thirties, who had been brought up as a Mormon. As Cheever felt ‘a profound stirring of love’ and came on to Max, Max felt ‘confusion and revulsion’. That spring Cheever noted:

  How cruel, unnatural and black is my love for Z. I seem to mean to prey on Z’s youth, to drive Z into a tragic isolation, to deny Z any life at all. Love is to instruct, to show our beloved what we know of the sources of light, and this may be the declaration of a crafty and lecherous old man. I can only hope not.

  In fact, he hoped not quite a lot of the time. And his hoping not was generally improved by sending Zimmer’s work too to the New Yorker.

  Since Cheever took the view that sexual stimulation could improve his eyesight, part of Max’s function, once their affair began, was to offer the same comfort as a good pair of spectacles might have. (When driving at night, Cheever used to ask his wife to fondle his penis ‘to a bone’.) ‘Whenever Max submitted a manuscript,’ Bailey writes, ‘Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a handjob.’ Then (as Max noted in his journal) Cheever would ‘take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on his face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion’.

  Max, who was confused, as they say, rather than actually gay, was uneasy and guilty in the Cheever household.

  If he thought it was OK to parade me in front of Mary and his children, then I guess it was OK. The fact that I didn’t feel OK doing it was my problem … Obviously it’s what people in the East do, the way he takes it in stride. Sitting down at the dinner table with his family, an hour after I’ve given him a handjob and he still has stains in his corduroys from it, I guess this is OK here. It’s tearing my guts out, but Ben’s being nice to me, and Susie – who should take a fucking plate and bust it over my head – and poor Mary, you know.

  In her memoir, Susan Cheever wrote about the view the family took of Max’s presence.

  He was often at the house in Ossining, and although this was not a comfortable situation for him, he treated my mother with a relaxed courtesy and respect. In fact, he treated her a lot better than my father did. I was always glad to see him. He was pleasant and funny, and when they were together my father seemed more accessible than he usually was.

  In 1975, at the age of sixty-three, after a drunken term spent teaching at Boston University, Cheever stopped drinking. A year later, he finished his novel Falconer. Susan Cheever describes that year:

  My father’s certainty as a writer was never more apparent than during the year he was writing Falconer … Each chapter and scene seemed to stream from his imagination already written. These were the things he had been longing to say … Falconer is a novel about a man imprisoned for the murder of his brother. He is a heroin addict, and his marriage is a travesty of marriage vows. The centre of the book is a tender homosexual love affair.

  When the book was published, Cheever was on the cover of Newsweek with the caption: ‘A Great American Novel’. The book was number o
ne on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. In 1979 Cheever’s collected Stories won a Pulitzer Prize and wide critical acclaim.

  Falconer arose from the clash between the two most significant buildings in the town of Ossining: Cheever’s suburban home, which was for him and his family often like a prison, and Sing Sing. In the early 1970s, when he had exhausted himself by drinking and had also exhausted himself writing slack stories on the subject of the deep despair and the minor travails inherent in American East Coast suburban life, Cheever was invited to teach at Sing Sing, where he befriended one of the prisoners. He saw a great deal of this man when he was released. ‘Almost every set piece in Falconer,’ Bailey writes, ‘almost every detail … appears somewhere in Cheever’s journal entries about Sing Sing, based on information he’d extracted from inmates.’ The novel, which is short, has a relentlessness in tone, a gravity and seriousness, which is unlike anything else Cheever wrote. It is as though the book were not merely a strained metaphor for all the anguish Cheever felt and caused in his life, but an exploration and recognition of that anguish, presented in a style that was factual but also heightened and controlled and then filled with suffering. The style is risky in the way it allows bald statement to brush against an overall vision that is like something from the Psalms. The sense of violence, hatred, pain and deep alienation is offered raw; beside this, love, or something like love, comes as dark redemption or another form of power. In the middle somewhere are the grim ordinariness of prison life and some brilliant sex scenes. If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language.

  Cheever’s journals for the months when he worked on his masterpiece are fascinating. He understood that even the smallest experience, such as a wait at an airport, can become something much larger in the imagination. ‘On the question of crypto-autobiography,’ he wrote,

  and the fact that the greatness of fiction is not this, I am writing not from my experience as a teacher in prison but from my experience as a man. I have seen confinement in prison, but I have experienced confinement as a corporal in a line rifle company, as a stockade guard, as a traveller confined for 36 hours in the Leningrad airport during a blizzard, and for as long again in the Cairo airport during a strike. I have known emotional, sexual and financial confinements, and I have actually been confined to a dryout tank on 93rd Street for clinical alcoholics.

  In the next entry, he ends with a remark that is one of the few endearing remarks in his journals and should be the motto of every writer alive: ‘All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.’

  Cheever enjoyed being famous and dry for the last few years of his life. Since there was something petulant and childish about him when he was a drunk, now merely the child remained. Susan wrote about these years, as he basked in late success.

  Wealth and fame and love had an odd effect on my father … He went through a kind of adolescence of celebrity. At times he seemed to be his own number one groupie … In restaurants, he let head waiters know that he was someone important. Since this kind of behaviour was new to him, he wasn’t particularly graceful about it.

  Federico, whose remarks on his father are notable for their wisdom and general good humour, has the best line on his father’s fame: ‘When you’re a musician, people can ask you to play, and when you’re a movie star, people can ask for your autograph, but what does it mean to be a famous writer? Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That’s the goodies you get.’

  As he made an effort to repair the damage he had done to his family, Cheever was aware that his journals, 4,000 pages of them, lay in a drawer like a lovely toy time bomb. Two weeks before he died he phoned his son Ben: ‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I’d tell you that, because sooner or later somebody’s going to tell you and I’d just as soon it came from me.’ Ben wrote that he was ‘forgiving’. ‘But mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost as a whisper: “I don’t mind, Daddy, if you don’t mind.” ’ After his death, when Susan read the diaries, needing to flesh things out for her memoir, she was pretty surprised by the general tone and content, and ‘not only’, as Bailey writes, ‘because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff’. The New Yorker and Knopf paid $1.2 million for the rights to publish the diaries and they appeared in 1991. Mary Cheever, who had stayed with him until the end, did not read them. ‘I didn’t have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can’t read them. Snatches of them I’ve read, but I can’t sit down and read that stuff. It isn’t my life at all. It’s him, it’s all him. It’s all inside him.’

  Baldwin and ‘the American Confusion’

  In December 1962 The New York Times asked some of the year’s best-selling authors to write a piece describing ‘what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [their book] so popular’. In reply, Vance Packard, for example, explained that his book The Pyramid Climbers had been successful because, he believed, ‘there is a growing uneasiness among Americans about the terms of their existence, and many tell me that I often articulate their own apprehensions’. Patrick Dennis, author of Genius, wrote: ‘I can’t imagine what it is that makes my books sell and any author who claims to know is a fool or a liar or both.’ This did not deter Allen Drury, whose book A Shade of Difference was on the list. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘those readers who like what I have to say like it because it is honest, well-expressed and pertinent to the world in which we live.’

  James Baldwin’s Another Country had also been a best-seller, and Baldwin used the occasion to position himself ambiguously in two of the central pantheons of American beauty. ‘I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,’ he wrote,

  Miles Davis and Ray Charles – but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues … They are telling us something of what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them but compassion … I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound … I am aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’.

  Baldwin was claiming for his prose style and the structure of his novels something of the heightened, melancholy beauty of Davis and Charles; he was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain, the uncompromising glamour that these two American musicians offered the world. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to place him as a primitive, a writer who did not plan his work but merely let it soar, a writer not steeped in a writerly tradition, Baldwin needed to invoke as well the high priest of American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigour of his controlling imagination.

  Baldwin the best-seller in 1962 wanted to have it both ways. This need was first of all a way of unloosening him from any easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist that he carried in his temperament a sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something glittering and also as something hidden and secretive, a concern with language as both mask and pure revelation. But Baldwin also had a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence. The list of what had made him such an interesting stylist would be long. Over the years he would vary its ingredients. Sometimes, he would do so to distract the reader from his own artistry and sophistication; other times, he would do so because he liked the list for its sound and variation, as in the list he provided in Notes of a Native Son: ‘The King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech – and som
ething of Dickens’s love for bravura.’ But the style itself did not come simply; it could not be easily defined because it varied and shifted. It had real bravura moments, like a set of famous riffs, or an encore, such as this passage in part 1 of Another Country when Rufus and Vivaldo arrive at Benno’s Bar in the Village:

  The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there, drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in the corners watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women – who wandered incessantly from the juke box to the bar – and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here – closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated synthetic laments for love.

  It is easy to sense in this passage the rhythms of jazz, but also of the prose writers of an earlier generation, the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby, the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises. Baldwin was not afraid of repetition (‘some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women’), or setting up patterns of beat and sound (note the constant use of ‘were’), or using punctuation with care and control (note the comma before ‘when they got home’; note the semicolon after ‘rolled through the bar’), and then striking home with a phrase or an observation utterly surprising, and full of delight (note ‘gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity’ or ‘pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt’).