Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Racking his brain for story ideas—let alone a novel—didn't leave energy for much else, and Cheever found himself becoming “something of a recluse”: “My daily activity has been limited to bathing, shaving, watering the hyacinth Mary bought me, and smoking two packages of cigarets.” At such times his main companion was his journal, where he stored the sights and sounds and smells which might prove useful as story fodder, as well as the private sorrows which he was all but incapable of sharing with the world, at least in raw form. Cheever would later claim that he'd begun keeping a journal as a much younger man, but the earliest surviving pages were evidently written toward the end of 1939* —that is, shortly after meeting Mary (and making up his mind to marry her). This makes sense as a starting point, since the journal was primarily conceived as an exercise in professionalism; no longer a gadabout youth living off the charity of Yaddo, he couldn't afford to let salable impressions go to waste. As Susan Cheever explained, “He never said to himself, ‘This is good material.’ He didn't think that way. What you see in his journals is what he had to do instead, which is to write down everything that happened and see what rang and what didn't ring.”

  But, again, the journal was both a laboratory for fiction and a means of exorcising demons and fine-tuning the work-in-progress known as John Cheever. That summer, so much alone, he brooded with particular anxiety about his earlier amethyst-ring-wearing self, and prayed that he would have the “courage and decency” to assume the “grave responsibilities” of married life: “I have been evasive, God knows, but I have also come of age.” So he hoped. Also—lying in bed between stories, smoking and scratching his bedbug bites—he indulged in idle reveries about the kind of bon vivant he saw himself becoming:

  I find myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I've never learned how to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles’ five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones’ Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty … moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.

  But still he remained on Bank Street, though it was almost September, as if he was afraid of testing romance against reality. Only when the bedbugs had become “ravening” and carpenters descended on the place and began “pulling things apart” did Cheever hit the road at last for New Hampshire—not in a “large car,” of course, but the same old Model A.

  He needn't have worried. After being treated as family by a lot of “amiable people,” he “shouted and sang” as he drove back to New York a week or so later. “We will have a good life darling,” he wrote his bride-to-be, “a wonderful and beautiful life.”

  MARY WINTERNITZ wasn't so sure about that, but on the other hand it pleased her to marry “somebody considered a catch” by her family, who never thought she'd amount to much. For both her and Cheever, in fact, it might have seemed a happy outcome to ghastly protracted childhoods—and not a moment too soon, under the circumstances. “We just decided not to wait much longer with everything so uncertain,” Mary wrote her father in early 1941. “Why not take what you can get while you can get it?”

  And so they were married on March 22, in front of the fireplace at 210 Prospect Street in New Haven. The Episcopal chaplain of Yale, Sidney Lovett, officiated, though the modest ceremony was not religious or even especially conventional, given that Mary (“serious-minded radical as I was”) wore a “severe” gray suit with a corsage on her shoulder. Fred was Cheever's best man, while Mary was attended by her troubled sister Buff. Most of the other guests were also immediate family. Frederick Cheever (Sr.), looking tinier than usual, glanced around the villa in a nervous, furtive way, and—bumping into Bill Winternitz—piped, “I'm the old one!”

  “I do condescend to take thee as my wedded husband was the gist of her marriage vow,” Cheever wrote years later, in a characteristically bitter mood. At other times, he realized just how lucky he'd been: His wife, after all, was pretty and bright and talented all in her own right, and was moreover blessed with a very fortunate “grasp of ambiguities,” as Cheever observed. Mostly she was stoical. As she remarked to the New York Times (almost thirteen years after her husband's death), “My maternal great-grandmother came out of nineteenth-century New England, where you do what you have to do.”

  *”Even now, in a family of doctors, no one seems quite sure what was wrong with Helen,” Susan Cheever wrote in her memoir Treetops. “Her son Bill, a doctor, says it was nephritis, or kidney disease. Her daughter Jane tells me it was a blood disease—streptococcus septicemia—and that they found the cure with the discovery of sulfa drugs a year later.”

  * Aptly included in the first anthology of New Yorker fiction, published in 1940.

  † Though too ambiguous for The New Yorker, the story, oddly enough, appeared in Harper's Bazaar (September 1940) and was included in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1941.

  * Harvard misdates the first journal as having been started as early as 1934; there is no evidence, internal or otherwise, to support this. A few early entries are explicitly dated from 1940; the first pages (undated) appear to have been written during the last weeks of 1939. After 1940 Cheever rarely dated his entries.

  CHAPTER NINE

  {1941-1943}

  FOR THEIR HONEYMOON they spent a few pleasant days at Herbst's old house in Erwinna—”Venery Valley,” as Cheever named it, after the preferred way of passing time. During their first year of marriage, especially, the place was a beloved refuge for the couple; later, as an exhausted army private, Cheever would lie on his bunk and reflect on those lost, lazy days in prelapsarian Pennsylvania: “shopping in Frenchtown, building a fire to burn the damp out of the house, the first drink at four o'clock on the nose, the second drink at four-fifteen, the venery, the eating, the noise of the brook and the icebox motor at night, morning sunlight, breakfast, a walk into French-town maybe or raking hay or cutting wood.” As for their hostess, Josie, she was already on her way to becoming “a rambunctious ruin” (as Mary put it), whose constant and often peevish chatter struck Cheever, even then, as a bit much—but no matter: “I feel that the house is my own,” he wrote in his journal. “I see Mary and I living there after we have been married eight or nine years.”

  In the city they rented a two-room apartment at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue—the heart of the Village and only a few brisk footsteps from the Brevoort Hotel, where Cheever did much of his drinking. Even by Village standards, it was a remarkably alcoholic time: “I feel the presence of despair,” Cheever wrote, having listened awhile to the radio news, which was getting so bad he could hardly see the point of writing anymore, much less staying sober. Night after night he found himself “spilling martinis all over the Brevoort” with regulars such as Niles Spencer and the amiable lush Coburn (“Coby”) Gilman. When their friend Dorothy Dudley decided to wait out the war at home in Biddeford, the three men “drank her out of her apartment” and so inherited bits of wardrobe left over from her various ill-starred romances (“Coburn got a linen suit, Niles got a blue serge, and I got a check”). Meanwhile his disreputable Yaddo sidekick Flannery Lewis had also married and moved to the Village; whether at Sailors’ Snug Harbor or the Lewises’ place over the Black Cat Club, the wives would sit and sigh while their husbands quaffed as much as four quarts of whiskey a night—or so Cheever reckoned, penitently, in the midst of yet another stupendous hangover.*

  A more wholesome companion was the man who'd succeeded Maxwell as Cheever's editor at The New Yorker, Gustave (“Gus”) Lobrano. A tall, courtly Southerner, Lobrano preferred outdoor diversions such as badminton at his suburban home in Westchester, or fishing at an old family lodge on Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks. Lobrano was only ten years older than Cheever,
who nevertheless felt a filial urge to please the man as he tried to please Dr. Winternitz and had failed (as he saw it) to please his own father. Lobrano had taught Cheever to fish, and thus introduced him to the whole rugged ethos of the sporting life: the moose head over the fireplace, the chilly outhouse, the oddball furniture, the crack-of-dawn slogs through dense woods. “The big point is this is a man's world,” Cheever wrote after a visit to Cranberry Lake. “Raised in a matriarchal environment by an iron woman I am profoundly used to feminine interference, feminine tastes. Here there is no trace of it. … I returned with the world in focus for the first time in weeks, the possessor of much self-respect.”

  Cheever also befriended one of Lobrano's foremost discoveries, Edward Newhouse, who would eventually publish more than fifty stories in the magazine. What the two writers had most in common, as Cheever put it, was “an inability to draw the parts of [their] lives together.” In that respect, Newhouse had come an even longer way than Cheever—all the way from Hungary, in fact, whence Newhouse had emigrated at age twelve, shed his accent, and reinvented himself as a cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon litterateur. Cheever characterized his friend's “inscrutable” persona as an “unholy mixture of Budapest and the Ivy League,” while conceding that “inscrutability has its charm”—as he knew better than most. In one form or another, the friendship would last a very long time (“To Eddie, My oldest friend in the world,” Cheever inscribed a copy of Falconer), though always a certain distance obtained, perhaps because of a mutual awareness of each other's pretenses. Neither had finished high school and yet both found themselves in the company of sophisticated, accomplished people* —this by the force of their own talent and charm, of course, such that each might have wondered who in the end would go further. But all this was mostly latent in the old days: the young Cheever, Newhouse recalled, was funny and generous and “not at all concerned with image.”

  AFTER MORE THAN TEN YEARS of fatalistic anticipation, Cheever was almost relieved when war was finally declared in December. It was “very exciting” to mill with the masses in Times Square while the news of Pearl Harbor whipped around the Times Building, and afterward he and Mary “slipped out of the heavy-drinking set” and waited, with a kind of suspenseful tranquillity, for their lives to change. It wasn't that Cheever was eager to fight in a war: he promptly asked Cowley, who'd gotten a desk job in Washington, to “keep [him] in mind” if anything should open up, since he didn't rate his chances very high as a soldier. “All I know about war,” he wrote Herbst, “is what I saw in the movies ten years ago, and I still believe all of it; the screams, the amputated hand on the barbed-wire fence, and the trench rats.” But civilian life seemed absurd under the circumstances, and besides he was tired of living on advances from The New Yorker. When he had waited five months, then, he finally decided to enlist after a last idyllic week at Treetops—a last savoring of the good life that, rather miraculously, he'd managed to achieve after thirty difficult years. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, for in the Army there is no past,” he wrote in “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello,” published a month after his May 7 enlistment. “You are not married or single, rich or poor, a brilliant young man or a fool.”

  John Cheever, about to be absorbed into the army, reported to Fort Dix as a slightly taller and better-educated man than before: according to his service record, he was five foot six on that day in May (rather than five five and a whisper), and had finished high school as well as a year of college (Harvard, no doubt: his wedding announcement had noted that he'd studied there). So much for personal mythology. Fort Dix was “like a Boy's Camp” where one was either working hard or “sitting on fenceposts” staring at flat vistas. After a week or so, Cheever got a typhoid shot and boarded a train bound for Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina—a land of “razor-back hogs, grits, thin-bloodedness, spindly peach orchards, poorly attended American Legion parades on hot afternoons and a cultural bleakness that gleams through all [its] adornments,” as Cheever would remember the city and the South as a whole.* On arrival, the men were given new clothes and a big meal (“The food is very good and the table-manners of my buddies are bound to improve in such an atmosphere”), whereupon basic training commenced: rifle and bayonet drill, grenade throwing, and the like, as well as abrupt confinement to barracks for a long night of washing floors and windows while their sergeant got drunk at the Post Exchange.

  “Our sergeant is a strange and interesting man,” Cheever wrote Mary. “He comes I think from the back-woods of Tennessee or Mississippi, from an unsocial, hard-working people. He has no friends and his one idea is to make his platoon the best in the company. He has an hysterical temper.” This sergeant, a young man named Durham, had let his men know from the start that he wasn't afraid of them and didn't give a damn what they'd done in civilian life. In the blazing heat he drove them through “five poisonous gases without [their] masks” and over an obstacle course, again and again, then again after dinner if he wasn't satisfied. “I don't care if you faint,” he shouted, after a man fainted, “but if you're going to faint, tell me about it! You might die of sunstroke and I'd get the blame.” It didn't help that Durham was drunk much of the time, nights especially, when he'd roust the men out of bed and make them bump into one another as they tried frantically to make sense of his incoherent commands.

  Cheever's fellow soldiers were a diverse group. As he wrote Cummings, there was “an ex-smoke eater named Smoko, a clerk from the Chase National Bank, a waiter from the Hotel Westbury, two night club MCs, the wine steward from the Pierre, and a dozen or so longshoremen, steam-fitters, elevator operators.” On payday (fifty dollars a month), most of them went to Greenville, where the more cretinous were given Mickeys, robbed, and put in jail for the weekend. Cheever and a few weary older men decided, after that first paycheck, to share a taxi to the more distant town of Hendersonville, where they sat around the veranda of a shabby-genteel hotel drinking bourbon and chatting with friendly civilians. As they began to leave, “an old ex-prostitute or ex-actress” accosted them: “Goodbye, boys, and God bless you,” she said, weeping. “Remember, this is what you are fighting for.”

  “[M]ail call is the high point in my busy life,” he wrote Lobrano. It was odd reading letters amid the dusty bleakness of Spartanburg and learning that, somewhere, life went on much as before. Morrie Werner was still drinking at Bleeck's as his wife Hazel lay on a beach in Provincetown; The New Yorker was making do with a higher number of female and homosexual employees; Cummings was spreading himself as sunnily as ever around the Village, while sympathizing with his younger friend's predicament. “I too have slept with someone else's boot in the corner of my smile,” he wrote Cheever, enclosing an autumn leaf and a five-dollar bill. There was also a flurry of antic correspondence from old Frederick, who let his son know he was writing letters to his daughter-in-law, too (“Don't bother to answer them,” John advised her, “and don't bother to open them unless they interest you”). Frederick's letters began with the usual lyric evocations of the weather (“Another grand morning … the breeze ‘up and down the mast’—'wouldn't blow a butterfly off the mainsail’ “) and proceeded with a lot of folksy advice about soldiering, such as using castor oil to polish one's boots and always peeking into same “to make sure that no practical joker [has] put an egg in the toe.” A great fan of Soviet pluck, Frederick had also favored Stalin with a letter (“an old time Yank's appreciation of himself, his people and his country”) and bet his son a Coca-Cola that the Soviet leader would respond with a personal note. (“No word in reply from Premier Stalin,” he reported two weeks later. “Give me 30 days.”) As for Fred Jr., he was color-blind and hence disqualified from active service; instead he worked as an “employee relations” consultant to the War Department in Washington, to which he traveled each month with an air of great secrecy. To John he confided that they were “having a lot of trouble with negros.”

  After six weeks of boot camp, Cheever spent a weekend with Mary at a Greenville hotel. He was in
bad shape: whippet-thin and so nervous he couldn't sleep (“When I saw you in Greenville it was kind of a strain”). Sergeant Durham was in the midst of some sort of meltdown, and this made life unpredictable for his men. For hours at a time he'd stay in his room and drink steadily while an ominous silence prevailed in the barracks. One night the men were undressing, or already in bed, when Durham suddenly emerged “with his fatigue hat pulled down over his ears, fully dressed in blue denims and leggings. He had evidently fallen into a drunken stupor and he thought it was morning.” It got so bad Cheever began to feel sorry for the man. A burly private had given Durham an awful beating one weekend in town, from which he returned a day or so later with “his face sewed up and a pair of dark glasses to cover his eyes.” He seemed, at last, a broken man, announcing (“very drunk”) that his girl in Texas had just lost two fingers in a sawmill. But this proved only a lull before the biggest storm of all: On the final day of boot camp, he insisted the men fall out of barracks in fifteen seconds. “[T]his turned out to be a physical impossibility and after several men had hurt themselves falling downstairs he settled for eighteen seconds.”