by Blake Bailey
The strain was such that even his vaunted affability began to fail him, and he had a final falling-out with Dodie Merwin. She was also living part-time in Washington, and the two would sometimes escape to New York in his Model A. Returning—no doubt morosely—from a weekend trip, they'd just crossed the Pulaski Skyway into the Jersey Meadowlands when the roadster was sideswiped and sent shambling off the road. Cheever got out and was pensively inspecting the flat tire, the steaming engine, when Merwin tried to lighten things up with a little laughter. “He got furious,“ she remembered. “I think he wouldn't let me back in the car. I don't know how I got back to New York, but whatever happened, we didn't go on to Washington together.” Cheever's rigid back—as he stomped off to find a garage—was the last she'd see of her old friend for many years. And once, later, while crossing the Pulaski Skyway, Cheever mentioned the quarrel to his wife, whose sympathy was entirely with Merwin.
By November, after six months on the job, Cheever had had enough. He told Alsberg that his assignments “seemed neither interesting nor useful,” and certainly not worth sacrificing his own work. But Alsberg valued his talents well enough to coax him into staying on a bit longer, in exchange for which he let Cheever return to New York and help edit the second volume of The New York City Guide. Lou Gody, the editor in chief, would later claim that the only job given to one of America's greatest writers was editing copy (“twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards,” as Cheever put it), but in fact Alsberg had canvassed his input on key points of content and given him a free hand in revising weak copy as well as generating his own. “Cheever thinks that the [introduction] ought to be somewhat condensed and be made a little less conventional,” he wrote the director of the New York office. “He thinks he can do this very quickly without spoiling the article. … Another point I took up with Cheever was the idea of having a very factual little piece at the beginning of the whole book telling a few things about the greater city.”
Though glad enough to be back in a town where he could buy liquor on Sundays, Cheever was less than enthralled by Alsberg's confidence. Skipping both Christmas and New Year's, he sequestered himself in the Chelsea Hotel and flailed through mounds of god-awful copy, the better to resign by the end of January and never look back. A year before his death, he was greeted at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters by Jim McGraw, an old FWPer like himself. “Hey Johnny,” said the jovial man, “it's a long time since I last saw you on the Writers’ Project!” “I don't want to talk about it,” said Cheever, and walked away.
THAT SUMMER (1939) HE WAS BACK running the launch at Lake George and “dreaming out a book.” Earlier he'd been at Yaddo, but had fled as soon as the summer guests began to arrive. “Yaddo, in season anyhow, has become impossible,” he wrote. “The must those yellow carpets exhale, the lame conversation, and the pathetic picture my colleagues in numbers of more than five can produce, is more than I can take.” Besides, there was a “good deal more license” at Lake George in terms of “drinking, screwing, etc.” The latter activities—plus water-skiing—took up most of his time. He was having a strenuous affair with an older woman, a gorgeous brunette named Peg Worthington who was on the rebound from a dull marriage. Worthington liked drinking almost as much as Cheever, and “sang [his] praises as a male” more than any woman he'd ever known. The two had befriended a playboy named Comstock who had his own boat, a powerful GarWood that ran rings around the old Fay & Bowen; Cheever never forgot the excitement of skiing into a rain squall at blazing speed—or for that matter the whole heady, hedonistic spree: “That was the summer when I used to screw P[eg] in the old matchboard bedroom and we used to steal [Comstock's] father's scotch,” he reminisced in his journal. “Even today the smell of scotch reminds me of that summer. We used to drink and neck and tear up and down the lake between the narrows and the village.”
The lark ended in apposite fashion for a man who'd been so preoccupied with the fate of his generation: Worthington left for Reno “to divorce a stuffed shirt named Harold,” and a few days later Germany invaded Poland. The news, said Cheever, was “a howling wind that shakes the island;” suddenly Bolton Landing was deserted, the lake was calm, and oddly, elsewhere, the world was sliding toward disaster. For a while, Cheever was grateful for the relative tranquillity. His friend Pete Collins had also come to the lake, and was a good if taciturn companion. (The man's aloofness was later put in perspective when Collins admitted that his wife had left him just prior to his departure for Lake George.) “We got on one another's nerves some,” Cheever wrote Denney, “but we worked all morning, water-skiied all afternoon and worked all evening for three weeks. It was a cold and a lonely stretch, but walking up to the post-office at six in what used to be the football season, playing darts with the mountaineers, watching them shutter the lake houses and draw up the boats, was a lot more memorable than Skidmore's hysterics or those goddamned martinis we used to put away.” Cheever would later reflect on how comfortable he'd felt in Collins's company. They slept “beararse” in the same narrow bed “without any trouble”—indeed, such was the serene asexuality between them that Cheever didn't mind walking from bed to bathroom in a state of rampant (but impersonal) arousal, making Collins laugh by pissing straight up in the air. In the evenings Collins kept him company while he went for a solo swim (“beararse” again) in the cold water, whereupon he'd take a hot bath and report to dinner in coat and tie. Once, he asked Collins, who cooked, why the plates weren't warmed: “That's a very peculiar request,” said Collins, “from a horny, penniless bastard stuck on an island on a mountain lake at the beginning of duck season.”
Cheever might have remained on the island for quite a while longer (and thereby altered his destiny in any number of ways) were it not for the intervention of his new editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell. One day in 1938—shortly after Maxwell had moved to fiction from the art department—Katharine White had “turned Cheever over to him.” Not only was Maxwell persistent in soliciting Cheever's work, but he tended to suggest revisions rather than rejecting stories outright. The first “casual” he bought, “Washington Boarding House,” was a result of this process. Rejected with encouragement toward the end of Cheever's tenure at the FWP, the piece was later revised and resubmitted to Maxwell, who bought it at a higher rate than Cheever had ever been paid by the magazine. Maxwell's attentiveness was all the more flattering—and his editorial advice valuable—because he himself was already, at age thirty, the author of two well-regarded novels, Bright Center of Heaven and They Came like Swallows. For most of his career, though, his own reputation would be eclipsed by the greater fame of the writers he edited: Nabokov, Salinger, Welty, and (as Maxwell put it) “three wonderful writers all named John”—O'Hara, Updike, and Cheever.
Like many New Yorker fiction editors—but more so—Maxwell cultivated friendships with his writers: he wrote long personal letters applauding their successes and commiserating over their failures; also, he was good about rushing payment, especially to writers such as Cheever in almost constant distress. No matter how desperate the writer, though, Maxwell was never apt to let sentiment interfere with his critical judgment. Though exquisitely tactful, and eager to help if warranted, he was rigid about rejecting work that fell below his standards. While Cheever was still at Lake George, for instance, Maxwell rejected his story “The Simple Life” because it violated an old Ross taboo against stories “concerning writers and their difficulties,” which (as Maxwell wrote Geraldine Mavor in Lieber's office) “have been the difficulties of writers since time began.” That said, Maxwell was careful as ever to accentuate the positive: “We have great hopes for Cheever and feel that even in this story there is that special quality which he gives to his things and which is exactly right for the New Yorker.”
By then Maxwell had already made it possible for Cheever to leave Lake George. A few weeks before, he'd written Cheever asking if he could come to the city and discuss “Nothing Has Happen
ed,” a story Maxwell rather liked but thought only “half done.” Cheever replied: “This finds me stranded on an island, surrounded by deep water, without the means for a trip to New York. If you would return NOTHING HAS HAPPENED with your suggestions, I'm quite sure I could fix it up within the week.” A few days later, Cheever received a detailed, single-spaced page of suggestions and duly revised the story (renamed “The Happiest Days”); by the end of October he was back in Manhattan with money in his pocket. It was the beginning of a friendship that would prove both rewarding and deeply tortured. “I appreciate your personal interest in John,” Mavor wrote Maxwell at the time. “You have done a great deal toward helping us sell regularly to the New Yorker.” Quite so: before 1939, Cheever had published a total of five stories in the magazine; by 1940, he was averaging almost a story a month.
Thus Cheever was already launched when Maxwell resigned that year to concentrate on his own writing, and more than a decade would pass before he resumed duties as Cheever's fiction editor. In the meantime, the two occasionally met in New York. In the early days, especially, Maxwell was struck by Cheever's “immense charm”: “One of my college friends happened to be visiting us when John came to dinner,” he recalled in 1993. “And John's conversation was so pyrotechnic that my friend spoke of it all the rest of his life as something wonderful that had happened to him, that he had had dinner with Cheever.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
{1939-1941}
MORE THAN FIVE YEARS had passed since Cheever had broken with his brother—more than five years without a fixed address, drifting between Boston and New York and Saratoga, often poor and (whatever the company) more or less lonely. Now, as 1939 drew to a close, he again faced “the grey light of New York apartments”: Peg Worthington had returned to the city from Reno, and “after the usual ring-around-the-rosey” had decided “very wisely” to marry an editor at Viking, Marshall Best. “There was a wedding breakfast at Beekman Place a couple weeks ago,” Cheever reported in January, “with champagne, tears, beluga, and a German band playing the Wedding March, I saw them off to Guatemala, a light snow falling, and ended up in traffic court on a drunken driving rap. That was the end of the summer.”
More than ever at loose ends, Cheever had returned that autumn to the Chelsea Hotel and told friends to address letters care of his agent. “I don't know where to go,” he wrote Denney. “I'm not up to taking a house alone in the country and I don't know of anyone I can live with.” It seemed as though all his old friends and lovers were getting married—Denney included (the year before)—each secure in the love of at least one person amid the looming threat of war. Cheever, meanwhile, lay on a bed at the Chelsea and fought away thoughts of suicide. “I didn't want to sleep alone anymore,” he'd often remark, when asked why he'd gotten married.
• • •
WHATEVER ELSE CHEEVER WOULD SAY about his marriage over the years, he wouldn't call it dull. “I think of how thrilling our life has been,” he wrote in 1979 (at a time when he and his wife were barely on speaking terms). “We have been welcomed all over the world, we have become rich, our children are splendid, and all of this began when we met in an elevator on a rainy autumn afternoon.” The elevator was at 545 Fifth Avenue, where Cheever had gone to visit his agent's office and check galleys of “The Happiest Days.” Going up, both he and the pretty young woman had noticed each other, albeit for different reasons. Hers was a heart easily moved to pity, and the young man standing beside her was vividly pitiful: “[H]e was kind of slumped over and he was little,” she remembered. “He was very little.” He was so little the sleeves of his tweed coat covered his hands, and he seemed the worse for hunger. Cheever, in turn, had noticed the young woman because—well, she was pretty, and about the right size, and when she got off on the same floor and entered Lieber's office, he thought, “That's more or less what I would like.” So he sat beside her typewriter and read his galleys. “And I asked her for a date. And presently married her.”
Mary Winternitz—the woman so randomly chosen—had a remarkable past. Her mother was Dr. Helen Watson, daughter of the co-inventor of the telephone, Thomas A. Watson (“Mr. Watson, come here—I need you!”), and her father was the legendary dean of the Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Milton Winternitz, known to friends as “Winter” or “Guts.” Helen Watson was one of the first women to take a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, and had shocked her gentile New England family by marrying her pathology professor—a brilliant, dynamic Jew who had entered college at age fourteen and begun teaching medicine seven years later. During his fifteen years as the Yale dean, Winternitz turned a failing school into one of the world's great research facilities, thereby prevailing over the rampant anti-Semitism of that time and place. For the most part he succeeded by refusing to make an issue of Jewishness one way or the other—to a fault, some would say, since Jewish students enjoyed no favor in his eyes, and their numbers continued to be restricted under his leadership. On his daughter's Sarah Lawrence application he listed his religious preference as “Congregational” (though he noted that the applicant's paternal grandparents were Jewish), and Mary herself had not learned of her own Jewishness until eighth grade, when she was asked by others (who knew) to play Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
Cheever summed up his wife's early life as follows: “a cruel and beautiful mother, a violent father, a miserable childhood.” Fair enough. “I was the child she didn't want,” Mary said of her mother, who let her know that she'd been hopefully conceived as a male playmate for her brother Tom; the mother's next attempt ended in miscarriage, but she finally gave birth to a son, Bill, the baby of the family and “everybody's favorite.” When Mary was seven, her mother was hospitalized with a mysterious illness, and the two hardly saw each other until the woman's death five years later.* At the time, Mary's older siblings (two sisters, a brother) were away at boarding school, while Dr. Winternitz sequestered himself in the laboratory (“My own work is extremely confining,” he wrote on that college application, “and so I fear I see little of the children”). “I really grew up alone,” said Mary. “My mother wasn't there, my father was busy, and I was an odd character in school. I was very much alone and got in the habit of being alone and I like being alone.” Such prolonged introspection in her formative years—”I grew up leading other people's lives” (i.e., by reading books)—had, it seems, some curious results. In 1970 a psychiatrist puzzled over the fifty-two-year-old woman's “very little-girlish speech and behavior,” which Susan Cheever regards as “a need” on her mother's part to remain a child—the way, for example, she kept her youthful looks into her sixties, or the way her high-pitched voice used to induce strangers, on the phone, into asking if her mother was home. As for Cheever's view of the matter, he generally focused on the “violent father” aspect. As he alleged in his journal, his father-in-law had beaten Mary with a belt when she was a child, and even at the best of times the man's standards of perfection were daunting. “Mary is an average girl from most standpoints except for a rather keen intellect,” Dr. Winternitz noted for Sarah Lawrence. “She is fairly attractive, but this could be increased if her posture was better and if she took a little more pains with her appearance.” He was loath, however, to give such advice: “because” (he added) “I am fearful of imposing my will on the children.”
Things did not improve when Dr. Winternitz married, in 1932, the New Haven socialite Pauline (“Polly”) Webster Whitney, widow of Stephen Whitney. “MEDICAL HEAD CRASHES SOCIETY BY WEDDING SMART SET LEADER,” the Waterbury Herald announced. In keeping with her set, Polly esteemed people who were attractive—a catchall term for witty, good-looking, well-mannered, etc.—and while she thought Mary and her brother Bill were all right, the other Winternitz children were hopeless. Worst of all was the oldest, Elizabeth, called Buff because of the way she'd lisped her name as a child. When the girl dropped out of Vassar in 1934 and was subsequently diagnosed as manic-depressive, it was Polly's emphatic opinion that she should be sterilized. Polly'
s children from her first marriage—Stephen, Freddy, Louisa, and Janie—were tall, blue-eyed, and charming, hardly the type to consort with a bona-fide lunatic, or even the latter's relatively normal (but also short and awkward) siblings. “Perhaps Winter imagined the merging of the two families as a surgical transplant,” Susan Cheever wrote in Treetops, “a transplant that would bring together the worldliness of the Whitneys with the seriousness and intelligence of his own children.” It didn't work out that way. With the not-so-tacit support of their mother, the Whitney children patronized and persecuted their stepsiblings; and though Mary may have become all the more withdrawn and insecure, she also adapted in ways that would arguably serve her well in married life.
Rather than join her combative family at their estate in New Hampshire, Mary spent the last two summers of college broadening her horizons. In 1937, she toured New England with the Emergency Peace Campaign, a collection of young lefties determined to save the country from another ruinous foreign war. “Each breath you draw,” Miss Winternitz declaimed, “brings you nearer to organized slaughter. You face conscription. …” The following summer she and a friend went on a bicycle tour of France, and Mary was abashed to learn that the French were appalled at her for opposing American involvement in the war. Otherwise it was perhaps the happiest time of her life. Before college she'd attended the International School of Geneva and become fluent in French, which made her travels around the Provençal countryside all the more pleasant. Indeed, during the long domestic decades that lay ahead, she would often yearn to return to France, but her husband always refused. He claimed it was because of his comrades at Normandy and so forth, but, as his daughter wrote, “I think he avoided France because of my mother's infatuation with the country, and because she spoke the language and he didn't.”
