Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  As if to relate more closely to the reader, to attach him or her more tightly to him, Maxwell grew increasingly impatient with the disguises and falsifications—the pretenses—of fiction. The busily omniscient modernist author of Bright Center of Heaven and They Came Like Swallows becomes, in the “Some Explanations” section of The Château, a postmodern exponent of unknowability: we are mysteries to one another, and an honest narrative retains its puzzles. His novella So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) is the triumphant culmination of this approach, winning Maxwell—whose distinctive career had been unduly shy of awards—the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the best novel of the previous five years. In his amusing acceptance speech, Maxwell made much of the fact that the box handed him, ostensibly containing the medal, was in fact empty, a precaution taken because at a previous occasion a freshly presented medal had been accidentally dropped and damaged. With a similarly disarming admission, he announced to the reader that the central story of So Long, See You Tomorrow—a vivid tale, based on childhood memories and a few photostatted stories from the local newspaper, of farm-country adultery, leading to double separation, murder, and suicide—was a fabrication:

  If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.

  On an early page, he calls his work a “memoir—if that’s the right name for it.” Maxwell knew, slightly and briefly, the boy identified as Cletus Smith, a son of the murderer; years after the scandal, he spotted him in the corridor of a big Chicago high school and, shocked by surprise, said nothing to him. This failure haunted him; he never saw Cletus again. Giving this confession a context, he tells the reader the personal story already reflected in his fiction—his mother’s death, the dishevelment of grief that followed, and the move with his father and stepmother to Chicago, leaving the idyll of his boyhood in Lincoln behind. This basic autobiography is imparted with a fresh stylistic firmness, a bluntness not possible when his near kin were alive, and a note of grievance not struck before: Why did nobody protect him from the brutal bullying by stronger children to which he was subjected as a delicate child? Why did neither his father nor his older brother talk to him about his mother’s death? He describes his inability to master the piano, which his omni-competent father played with ease and pleasure, as “a small plot of ground on which I could oppose my father without being actively disobedient.” His music teacher, we learn, was the go-between for the love letters his father received from the woman who became his second wife, and his son was enlisted to deliver them; he retrospectively marvels at this. As young teen-agers, he and Cletus, now living in Lincoln with his mother, meet to play, a bit dangerously, in the open framework of the new house that Maxwell’s father is building on the edge of town, an emblematic framework that the narrator, now an elderly New York sophisticate, rediscovers in Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M., at the Museum of Modern Art.

  In the tragic romance that Maxwell, in our plain sight, invents, he shows, for a boy reared in a small city, a persuasive feel for the hard daily life of tenant farmers in the black-earth countryside around Lincoln; the bleak tale-within-a-tale of friendship and love gone miserably awry earns him a place as a prairie novelist in the naturalist Midwestern vein of Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland. The editors at The New Yorker, which printed So Long, See You Tomorrow in two installments, objected to the articulated thoughts of a dog, Trixie, belonging to Cletus’s family, but Maxwell, as with the second section of The Château, got his way. The dog’s thoughts, which are not complex, are one with his creator’s lifelong habit of personifying furniture, objects, and rooms, sometimes giving them words to speak, within the wide discourse of things that present themselves to human awareness. His tender anthropomorphism here descends even upon a lowly ant, as Cletus “with a stick … drew crosses in the dirt, making life difficult for an ant who had business in that patch of bare ground.”

  The fault, if any, with So Long, See You Tomorrow lies in the device of the self-conscious, conspicuously confiding author: when the author becomes the main character, the other characters appear secondary, and their actions and decisions become ripples within the central feat of storytelling itself. Cletus hardly exists compared with the boy the narrator once was; remembering the two boys testing their equilibrium in the half-built house, Maxwell writes, “It occurs to me now that he was not very different from an imaginary playmate.” When he searches his high-school yearbook for any image or mention of Cletus, he finds none, as if the character were fictional after all. The contract between writer and reader, which calls for a willing suspension of disbelief, has been quietly abrogated. When the author casts off his cloak of invisibility, and a novel is no longer (as Stendhal put it) “a mirror that strolls along a highway” but one that strolls down Memory Lane, he stands in front of the curtain either as a memoirist or as a fabulist exulting in the magic of make-believe; Maxwell in his shorter late works was now one and then the other.

  Those already well acquainted with Maxwell’s work will surely find something new and delightful in the forty fabulous “improvisations” that the editor has assembled from the twenty-one that Maxwell included in All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories (1995) and nineteen published in sundry places between 1957 and 1999. The earliest of them all, “The Woodworker,” was written in 1946, as a Christmas present for Emily. In a National Public Radio interview in 1995, he explained the genesis of this improvisatory mode:

  Actually, they began because my wife liked to have me tell her stories when we were in bed in the dark before we were falling asleep. And I didn’t know where they came from, but I just said whatever came into my head and sometimes I would fall asleep in the middle of a story and she would shake me and say, “What happened next?” And I would struggle back into consciousness and tell her what happened next. And then I began to write them for occasions, for Christmas and birthdays.… And I would sit down at the typewriter and empty my mind entirely and see what came out on the typewriter, and something always did. And from the first sentence a story just unfolded.

  His time in psychoanalysis possibly contributed to such easy and trusting access to the wellsprings of narration; certainly the tales, in their playful fairy-tale manner, tap into his deepest sensations and moral convictions, with no hint of preachiness. The last three in the volume, for instance—“The Dancing,” “The Education of Her Majesty the Queen,” and “Newton’s Law”—are moving parables of marital fidelity, of altruism, and of death’s heavy approach, respectively. There is a sparkle to these fairy tales that reminds us of Bright Center of Heaven, with its rueful comedy of brightness. Whereas Maxwell, according to Carduff’s Chronology, before embarking on his book-length essay about his family history in Ancestors (1971), reread E. B. White for stylistic inspiration, his fables suggest Thurber’s, and Thurber’s faux-medieval children’s books, fleshed out with a novelist’s superior interest in human circumstances.

  Maxwell’s sublimely diffident and benign little essay “Nearing Ninety” touches on the pleasures of remembering:

  I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living. But now it is different, I have to be careful. I can ruin a night’s sleep by suddenly, in the dark, thinking about some particular time in my life. Before I can stop myself, it is as if I had driven a mineshaft down through layers and layers of the past and must explore, relive, remember, reconsider, until daylight delivers me.

  “A Final Report” (1963), inventorying the estate of Aunty Donald, a female neighbor who used to carry the author as a frail infant on a pillow, was the first short story that posed as a reminiscence and called the fictional Draperville Lincoln. He said, “I found I could use the first person without being long-winded or boring, and at the same time deal with experiences that were not improved by invention of any kind.” Pieces of fiction closely portraying his father and his older b
rother followed—the latter, “A Game of Chess,” signed with the pseudonym Gifford Brown to protect his brother’s feelings. The marvellous very short story “Love” (1983) commemorated Miss Vera Brown, his fifth-grade teacher, whom all her students loved, and who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. The longer “Billie Dyer” (1989) drew liberally upon historical research in its portrait of a Lincoln black man who became a prominent physician in Kansas City and appeared as one of Ten Most Distinguished Men in Lincoln’s centennial pageant, in 1953. The story gave its title to a collection of fictionalized memoirs, including among the subjects Maxwell’s father’s friends, his mother’s brother Ted, his own brother Hap as a child, and William Dyer’s sister Hattie, who had cared for Maxwell’s Grandmother Blinn and then worked for the Maxwells for five years. In the story “The Front and the Back Parts of the House,” Maxwell tells how, on a return visit home, he found Hattie in his Aunt Annette’s kitchen and impulsively put his arms around her: “There was no response. Any more than if I had hugged a wooden post.” He later traced the snub to an invented black drunk, in Time Will Darken It, whom Hattie took as a portrait of her husband. He was not, but Maxwell did believe, ever more strongly, that reality was the best fiction. In that same recollection, he says in an aside that even when the author imposes the disguise of a name on characters, actual names “are so much more convincing than the names he invents for them.” Apropos of “Billie Dyer,” he told an interviewer, “For me, ‘fiction’ lies not in whether a thing, the thing I am writing about, actually happened, but in the form of the writing … a story, which has a shape, a controlled effect, a satisfying conclusion—something that is, or attempts to be, a work of art.”

  He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. In “Nearing Ninety,” he likened death to lying down for a pleasant afternoon nap and found “unbearable” only the thought that “when people are dead they don’t read books.” His shapely, lively, gently rigorous memoirs, out of the abundance of heartfelt writing he bestowed on posterity, are most like being with Bill in life, at lunch in midtown or at home in the East Eighties, as he intently listened, and listened, and then said, in his soft dry voice, exactly the right thing.

  Basically Decent

  CHEEVER: A Life, by Blake Bailey. 779 pp. Knopf, 2009.

  On the one hand, Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever is a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal—a nearly eight-hundred-page labor of, if not love, faithful adherence. Cheever, the author of five novels and of many—121—of the most brilliant and memorable short stories The New Yorker has ever printed, died in 1982, at the age of seventy, and in the years since an unusually full and frank wealth of biographical material has accumulated: a memoiristic biography, Home Before Dark (1984), by his daughter, Susan; a collection of letters, edited and annotated by his son Benjamin (1988); a four-hundred-page biography by Scott Donaldson (1988); and, an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment, the forty-three hundred pages, mostly typed single-space, of Cheever’s private journals, stored at Harvard’s Houghton Library and mined, by Robert Gottlieb, for six excerpts published in The New Yorker between August of 1990 and August of 1991. Bailey estimates himself to be one of possibly ten persons to have read through the journals, which he calls “a monument of tragicomic solipsism.” His investigations have been tireless: from the murky details of Cheever’s indubitably Yankee ancestry and his career at Thayer Academy right through to the confidential lab reports on his terminal cancer, Bailey distills facts from the impressionistic version of reality that Cheever spun around himself. Of a certain Dr. Schulman, whose divulgences to his patient may have been less than candid, Bailey informs us in a footnote, “I’d very much like to hear Schulman’s side of the story, but he died several years ago in a head-on collision,” and of an aspiring writer assured by Cheever that he should submit his novel to a New York publisher “and they’ll publish it right away,” we learn in parenthesis, “ ‘I never got it published,’ the author reported thirty years later.”

  On the other hand, all this biographer’s zeal makes a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point where even I, a reader often enraptured by Cheever’s prose and an acquaintance who generally enjoyed his lively company, wanted the narrative, pursued in methodical chapters that tick past year after year, to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life which, for all the sparkle of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and to those around him. The biography’s valedictory pages are rather stunningly anticlimactic. Though The Wapshot Chronicle and Falconer appear on best-novels-of-the-century lists, “neither novel (nor any of Cheever’s others) is read much anymore.” “Academics tend to throw up their hands: Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated.” In Ossining, New York, where he lived for decades as the town’s most prominent citizen, a move to name a short street after him was turned down at a town meeting, and only the main reading room of the public library honors his memory. The joy of the physical world, so often extolled in his fiction, and the triumph of his rise from an impoverished young immigrant to New York City to star literary status afforded him, it seems, far from enough comfort. Max Zimmer, the chief of the male acolytes and servitors brought into Cheever’s life by his belated homosexual acknowledgment and by his gradually increasing debility, said at the time, “If there’s someone who never loved himself, it was John.” Twenty-five years later, Max, married and with a family, and having turned his literary ambitions into a livelihood as a technical writer, summed up his former mentor:

  He was extraordinarily blessed by anyone’s standards … but he liked to say that all he had in life was an old dog. There was his despair. And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others.

  Gottlieb, who as head of Knopf published two best-sellers (The Stories of John Cheever, Falconer) that at last gave Cheever the financial ease that had always eluded him, said, of his editorial selection from the journals, “There were … those who thought, ‘Why are you doing this stuff? I don’t want to read one more word about this dopey alcoholic fag.’ ”

  The basic psychoanalysis of John Cheever has been amply delivered: the unwanted late child, threatened by his father’s demand that the pregnancy be aborted; the smaller, sensitive brother of a larger, apparently successful brother; the helpless witness of his family’s descent from prosperity to a poverty of which his mother’s gift shop, in downtown Quincy, was a humiliating symbol; the homosexual yearnings suppressed in favor of mock-aristocratic respectability and an idealized domestic life; the fearfully copious drinking, bred of shyness and insecurity; and the eventual nick-of-time sobriety, with its attendant recognition of his homo-sexuality. Repression and expression: twin causes of complication and disharmony with others. Only dogs, usually old and feeble, didn’t let him down.

  Bailey’s massive accounting did introduce, to me, some new paths of meditation upon Cheever’s paradoxical character. In the mid-1930s, when he was selling a story now and then to various magazines and, as a protégé of Yaddo’s Elizabeth Ames, running a launch on Lake George, he had an affair with Lila Refregier, the wife of a friend. “[I] always hoped that something, the love of a beautiful woman, would cure my ailments. I thought that Lila would lead me away from my jumpy past,” he wrote in his journal in 1967. She, many years later, remembered him as “such a nice person, a basically decent person, with something in him that kept him from being completely decent.” What was this something? What were his “ailments”? None of us are completely decent, but for decades he brought to social intercourse the impatience of an incorrigible alcoholic, his inmost attention focused on the next drink. He could be whimsically gracious to visiting strangers, but also shockingly rude; a friend from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop recalled how Cheever got drunk before a scheduled meeting with some local Christian Scientists—“This was a big event for these people, and he just treated them like dirt.” As a
parent, he could be loving and companionable but was also sharply sarcastic and, in what he confided to his children, merciless. With the two oldest, Susan and Benjamin, he made no secret of his disappointments. Susan, who resembled him in her compulsions, wild streak, and intelligence, was overweight in spite of both parents’ relentless nagging; she told Bailey, “In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them, I’m proud to say, and hope I’ve continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty.” Ben, when he came to read his father’s confessional journals, was dismayed by how little he and his siblings figured in them; he underwent, during his first marriage, a period of determined estrangement. Federico, the youngest child and the only one not a writer (he became a law professor), attempted to be his father’s caretaker in the worst days of Cheever’s alcoholic decline, and takes the most level and dispassionate view of the fabulist as essentially clueless in the real world: “He was always at sea. He didn’t understand how the world worked. He was forever being cheated by tradesmen.… He had no profession. He’d spent his entire career as a writer.” Federico, known in the family as Fred, insisted, “No one, absolutely no one, shared his life with him. There was no one from whom he could get honest advice.”

  Certainly Cheever’s voluminous harping, in his journals, on the sexual non-responsiveness of his wife, Mary, is obtuse and less than decent in perceiving no link between Mary’s coolness and his daily drunkenness. Her attempts to get herself a separate life, through poetry and teaching and new associations, were transformed, in one of the last of his stories that could be called masterly, “The Ocean,” into the high-voiced (Mary’s distinct trait) heroine’s attempt to poison her loving husband, and, in a later story published in Esquire, “The Fourth Alarm,” into a wife’s enthusiastic enlistment in the cast of an all-nude Oh! Calcutta!–like revue. Gleeful nudity was really his own thing; even while casting off his own sexual fetters, he remained prim and censorious toward others. There was, between his shadowy “proclivities” and his luminous work, an almost organic disconnect. We learn, in Bailey’s biography, that Cheever, while in the Army in 1942, scored too low on the IQ test that would have qualified him for Officer Candidate School. He asked Mary to send him a book “on easy ways to get a high IQ,” so he could raise himself “out of the moron class,” but when he took the test a year later he still fell short of the requisite score of 110. He never rose above the rank of technical sergeant. His lack of formal education and of mathematics in general was surely a cause, but, still, it startles us that this impressively agile writer, with a prodigious memory that allowed him to recite a finished story verbatim, scored so averagely. Nor did he improve with age and celebrity; Smithers, the New York City sanatorium where he finally dried out, in 1975, had him upon admittance take “the abbreviated Shipley IQ test (scoring, as ever, in the high-average range).” A pre-Smithers CAT scan had disclosed “severe atrophy of the brain,” which is cited as the possible cause of his intermittent spells of musical hallucination and “otherness.” “I am in a bell jar or worse since I seem to respond to nothing that I see,” he wrote. “I remember being as depressed in Rome. A cigarette butt in a cup, a formation of dust under a table seemed to represent the utter futility of staying alive.”