Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Ross tended to dislike any writing that smacked of the experimental or highfalutin, and one might have expected him to balk at Cheever's straying from strict realism. As an editor, though, Ross specifically insisted on an almost pathological clarity of detail, such that the reader never had to look twice at a sentence to gather its meaning, or wonder what exactly was happening in a given scene. If anything, such a quibbling passion for verisimilitude (“This story has gone on for 24 hours and no one has eaten anything”) may have contributed something to the precision of Cheever's own style, and sometimes Ross's edits were inspired: “In ‘The Enormous Radio’ he made two changes,” Cheever recalled; “a diamond is found on the bathroom floor after a party. The man says ‘Sell it, we can use a few dollars.’ Ross had changed ‘dollars’ to ‘bucks,’ which was absolutely perfect. … Then I had ‘the radio came softly’ and Ross pencilled in another ‘softly.’ ‘The radio came softly, softly.’ “

  In later years, when Cheever would wax nostalgic about his early association with The New Yorker, he'd claim a close acquaintance with Ross and elaborate on the man's legend as a lovable grotesque—a “scratcher and nosepicker” who used to make Cheever jump in his chair by saying “fuck” a lot at the lunch table. “I doubt very much if those lunches ever took place,” said Maxwell after Cheever's death, pointing out that Ross kept his distance from fiction writers as much as possible. Indeed, it seems the two only spoke in person once, when Lobrano introduced them at the Algonquin. “A few days later,” Cheever remarked to Newhouse, “I saw [Ross] in the elevator and he didn't recognize me.” Still, he was fond of the idea of Ross, and liked to tell of how desolate he'd been when he got news of the editor's death—such that he could hardly bear reading about it eight years later in The Years with Ross: “I leafed through the Thurber book on Ross last night,” he wrote Maxwell, “and when I read the part where Hawley says: ‘It's all over’ I burst into tears. I couldn't stop.”*

  IN THE MARGIN of one Cheever story—where a character comes home from work and changes clothes before dinner—Ross scribbled, “Eh? What's this? Cheever looks to me like a one-suiter.” He had guessed right, but then he ought to have known. Toward the end of the Ross era, Cheever was paid between five hundred and one thousand dollars a story, which meant that in a good year—with bonuses and occasional sales to other magazines—he made a little more than five thousand dollars. As he later reflected, “I think Ross's feeling was that if I was paid any more … I would get prideful, arrogant and idle.” Things were bad enough in 1947 for him to break down and let his wife take a job teaching composition at Sarah Lawrence, about which he was alternately grudging and derisive. “[S]he comes home with a briefcase full of themes written by young ladies named Nooky and Pussy,” he wrote Herbst; “but these nicknames would give you no indication of what these themes are about.” As for the pittance she was paid, Cheever reminded her that Newhouse's wife earned at least a hundred a week teaching the “fiddle” at Juilliard, but (he supposed) it was “too late for Mary to take up a musical instrument.” Nor would he allow her to console him when he was feeling hopeless about things, having learned from childhood that it was shameful to be caught without a stiff upper lip. At best he'd evade her sympathy with the usual quip and giggle, but when his mood was especially foul he'd “whip out at [her],” so that Mary learned to hold her tongue (“I did lots of tongue holding in those days”). But really he couldn't help it. Toward the end of that year—in some respects his most artistically successful yet—he was almost at the end of his rope. Of a bad day in October, he wrote in his journal:

  I tried to work with no success and early in the evening Gus called me and said they were not going to buy the Mink Decade [story]. This means I'm out a thousand dollars and six weeks work. Bob Linscott came for dinner and told me that Irwin [Shaw] had completed his novel and that it was magnificent. I didn't talk particularly well and drank quite a lot. I woke at four in the morning. The struggle for recognition then, for money, even for success in my own terms seemed hopeless, and I felt … that I had betrayed my pure and gentle family, and because of this the desire to kill myself was strong.

  While pondering suicide Cheever was his old jovial self among friends, though one day Ettlinger spotted him walking along First Avenue. About to say hello, he suddenly noticed the haunted look on Cheever's face—”such a powerful expression of sadness” that he quickly ducked behind a building until his friend had passed.

  No matter how dejected Cheever got, he was quite determined to finance a private education for his daughter, and hence his main anxiety the following spring (1948) was whether she'd be accepted at the elite Brearley School. Not only did they accept the four-year-old, but their “charming letter” applauded the “independence and extraordinary maturity” she'd shown in her interview; Cheever—passing along the good news to Polly and Winter—wondered whether such glowing terms could possibly be used to describe his “fat and wayward daughter.” Almost from the moment of her birth, he'd begun to suspect she wasn't going to be the slender, perky debutante he longed for, and before she'd reached the age of reason he found ways of letting her know she was disappointing him. “Sue is about the same,” he wrote the Ettlingers, when the girl wasn't quite three. “For a minute or two I thought she was going to get thin; but it didn't happen. Then I thought she might learn to swim; but no.” Perhaps forgetting that he himself had been chubby and unpromising as a child, Cheever was forever browbeating his daughter about her weight, banning candy and cookies and other snacks, with predictable results: “[W]hen I picked her up at the party there was frosting in her ears, several pieces of candy in her mouth … so that I'm afraid all of our hard work has been undone.”

  Mary Cheever's thirtieth-birthday gift, as she'd always say, was the birth of her second child, Benjamin Hale Cheever, on May 4, 1948. “We think he's handsome, intelligent, wirey, and strong,” Cheever reported to friends, “and actually he's very unlike Sue.” So at least the boy was born on good terms, though perhaps it helped that his father's financial prospects were looking up at the time. Two years before, dramatic rights to the “Town House” stories had been sold (netting Cheever $173) to Bernard Hart and Clinton Wilder, who'd hired Herman Mankiewicz to write an adaptation. The latter had won an Oscar for his Citizen Kane screenplay, but by 1946 he was often drunk, and the first (and only) act of his “Town House” play was, by Cheever's account, a cliché-ridden disaster: “All the people came out of a bad picture … a football bore, an old gentlemen [sic] with a tough, wisecracking cutie.” Mankiewicz was fired, and the property changed hands a few times, floating in limbo until the beginning of 1948, when it was picked up by one of Broadway's top producers, Max Gordon, who signed George S. Kaufman, no less, to direct and co-write (with Gertrude Tonkonogy). Cheever, though he received only fifty-two dollars a month until the play was in the black, was so bucked that he hired a maid to help his burdened wife with the housework: “This maid has a gray uniform with an apron … and is no great shakes as a cook,” Cheever wrote, “but at noon we all cram ourselves into the vestibule, ring a little bell and she brings in a plate of deviled ham sandwiches and trails after her a rich blend of patchouli and Nuit d'Armour [sic].”

  As opening night approached, Cheever was frankly “stage struck.” He'd taken to passing his afternoons at the Lyceum Theatre with Kaufman and Gordon, watching rehearsals and “saying No thank you very much to hundreds of women with strawberry hair.” On September 1, he and Mary went to Boston for a two-week tryout at the Colonial Theatre, and once again Cheever was interviewed by the enduring Mabelle Fullerton of the Patriot Ledger (“Former Quincy Boy Courting Miracle”), who described the author as a combination of Peter Pan, Voltaire, and Bambi. Cheever remarked that all the actors in Town House were “wonderful” (“just as I realized them in the stories”), and even wrote his own puff piece for the Boston Post: “From the shelter halves of Guam [i.e., where he'd written one of the “Town House” stories] to the new, comfortable seats in
the Colonial Theatre is a fairly long way for an idea to have come,” he concluded, “and I for one am very glad that it made the trip.” On opening night he and Mary checked in at the Ritz, had dinner with family and friends, then repaired en masse to the theater. The show, Cheever decided, was “a sentimental and moderately funny piece of bunk”: “Max Gordon waltzed Kay Brown around the lobby and said they were going to sell it to the pictures for a million dollars.”

  Two days later, a few qualms had crept into his head, and he returned to watch another performance in sober solitude:

  It seemed vulgar, mechanical, and unfunny. Going out to Quincy on the midnight bus I felt a depression that seemed to transcend that particular evening and those circumstances and to return me to a moment in my youth when perhaps I stepped into a cold and empty house. … We have lived insecurely for so many years that the thought that this trash might bring us a steady income has seduced and corrupted my judgement.

  His better judgment was confirmed when the play opened on September 23 at Broadway's National Theatre. In the meantime Cheever had done his best to salvage the thing with a flurry of revisions, while Kaufman had “shine[d] it up” with “so many gags … that it sounded like a recitation from a joke book.” As for the producer, Max Gordon, he'd spent twenty-six thousand dollars on the set alone: a full-sized cutaway of an Upper East Side town house. To no avail. Don Ettlinger, who'd cringed through opening night, remembered the final product as being crammed with a lot of “terrible” gags, and the New York Times agreed (“a thin, loose, mechanical whizzbang that never explodes across the footlights”). The play closed nine days later, after only twelve performances. “I don't quite know who to blame, with the exception of myself,” Cheever wrote his in-laws. “[N]ow and then I feel sorry for myself because I had such wonderful ideas for spreading the money around, but it's a speculative business and I'm glad we confined our speculation to day-dreaming.”

  In his journal Cheever wrote, “We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat. … We have many bills.” Determined to write “a story a week,” he was rejected four times in a row by The New Yorker, which meant he wouldn't be receiving a yearly bonus, either.* Faced with dire poverty, and forced into writing “lifeless and detestable” fiction, Cheever chided himself for entertaining an “unreasonable” degree of petulance (“This is a patriarchal relationship, and I certainly respond to the slings of regret, real or imaginary”). At length he dug himself out of his latest hole with an easy lampoon for the slicks titled “The Opportunity,” about a seemingly dull-witted girl who passes up a choice part in a Broadway play because (as she is not too dull-witted to notice) “it stinks;” viciously denounced for her integrity, she yet evades the “[s]corn, ridicule, abuse, and disgust” that are heaped on everyone associated with the play, which closes after five performances in Philadelphia. The story sold to Cosmopolitan for $1,750, Cheever's highest price yet, and perhaps served as a somewhat satisfying coda to the whole Town House debacle.

  Meanwhile Irwin Shaw's first novel, The Young Lions, was a big hit; moreover Shaw's wife had remarked to Cheever that, in the novel's home stretch, her husband had written at the inspired pace of seventeen pages a day! “This seems to me seriously lacking,” Cheever noted, after a long and mostly sober night of reading. “Knowing the fierceness of competition among writers I sometimes feel that my knowledge of Irwin, my love of Irwin may have buried some malevolence deep in my judgement but it is my judgement that this is not much of a book.” Be that as it may, his friend was now a bona-fide celebrity, and while lunching at the Algonquin, Cheever found himself smiling and nodding at the news that Irwin had just returned from Cap d'Antibes and was getting a big welcome-home party from Frank Capra, etc. “I keep telling myself that this cannot go on,” Cheever wrote, “no, no, no, that this is all wrong.”

  CHEEVER HAD NOT REVISITED Yaddo since his raucous stays in the summer of 1940. Around that time he wrote a friend, “Elizabeth [Ames] has closed the door of Yaddo in my face remarking that my interests in Saratoga seem to center on the skiing, the riding club, and the Worden Bar & Grill.” The two remained fond of each other, though, and continued to write and promise to get together at some point.

  A reunion of sorts was hastened by a peculiar series of events in the spring of 1949. On February 11, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence staff had identified Agnes Smedley, author of several books on Red China, as a Russian agent. Smedley was ill and destitute by then, and had lived for almost six years (1943 to 1948) at Yaddo as, essentially, one of Mrs. Ames's charity cases. The War Department presently withdrew its charges, citing lack of evidence, though not before a couple of FBI agents came to Yaddo to interview Mrs. Ames, her guests, and her secretary—the last of whom, it so happened, had been acting as an informer for the past five years: “[W]henever I heard people talking very brilliantly red,” she said, “I have written down their name and address and dropped it off … for forwarding to the FBI.” This, of course, was not altogether surprising, since Mrs. Ames had in fact demonstrated a partiality toward radical authors: there was her longtime lover, Leonard Ehrlich, as well as a list including Josie Herbst, Eleanor Clark, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others. Amid the furor of the Alger Hiss case, and the McCarthy era soon to come, this was considered a very dubious state of affairs.

  At the time there were only four guests in residence: Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, Edward Maisel, and Elizabeth Hardwick. When FBI agents told Lowell that Yaddo was “permeated with Communists” and suggested that Mrs. Ames had been protecting a Russian spy, the poet—drinking heavily, in the grip of religious mania, and on the brink of perhaps the worst breakdown in his colorful career—rallied the other guests against Mrs. Ames and demanded a meeting with local members of the Yaddo board. Mrs. Ames, said Lowell, was “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system;” he insisted that she be fired immediately or else he'd continue his crusade on a larger scale; indeed, he felt as if he were fighting “against the Devil himself.” The board members, not a little shaken, assured the poet that they'd pursue the matter at their regular meeting in New York a few weeks later. Meanwhile the main topic of cocktail gossip in literary Manhattan was whether Yaddo was or was not a hotbed of communist traitors.

  “John Cheever was wonderful in his loyalties,” said Eleanor Clark, “and Elizabeth [Ames] was one of them.” Clark recruited Cheever and three others—Alfred Kazin, Harvey Breit, and Kappo Phelan—to draft a letter of protest against the witch hunt. “We feel that the charge currently being brought arises from a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts,” they wrote. “We feel this charge involves a cynical assault not only on Elizabeth Ames's personal integrity, but also on the whole future of Yaddo. … We regard their [Lowell et al.'s] action as a thoroughly foolish and nasty performance, dangerous to the extent that it weakens any sober fight against Communism.” The group collected fifty-one endorsements and appeared personally before the directors on March 26. After five hours of discussion, the board decided to censure Lowell and absolve Mrs. Ames (who nevertheless was divested of her power to extend visits to whomsoever she pleased). Recovering in a nursing home afterward, the embattled woman wrote Herbst*: “I do not know how I should have come through these dreadful two months if that little staunch Committee of which John is a member had not sprung into action over night, working swiftly and wisely. It is all a miracle.” Almost thirty years later, Cheever wrote in his journal: “Lowell is dead and God have mercy on his soul.”

  THE PREVIOUS SUMMER Cheever had finally shown a fragment of his novel to Linscott, who (as Cheever later noted) “found so little worthwhile that I was never able to look at the manuscript again.” After a long bout of story writing and other distractions, Cheever “slowly regrouped [his] forces for another trial,” but after months of effort he felt even more discouraged. The novel was
n't working. Even the prose was weak—full of “affectations” and “bad poetry,” perhaps by way of overcompensating for an absurd plot and dreary characters. “What is wrong with Aaron, a question I have asked a hundred times and may have to ask a hundred times more,” Cheever wrote. “He is not taken from life, but I did not mean him to be.” Aaron—the character that would someday become Leander Wapshot, an even more picturesque version of Frederick Cheever—was a man who suffered the same basic ills as Frederick (old age, poverty), but with neither the man's zaniness nor his benignity. As for the author's determination to demonize Aaron's wife, Sarah, simply because she opens a gift shop—well, obviously, it made no sense: “The descriptions of her enterprise make opening the shop a natural development,” Cheever reflected (with a fair-mindedness he could rarely muster in his own mother's behalf). “She also does this because they want money.”

  At the end of almost ten years of sporadic work on The Holly Tree, Cheever was utterly stymied and broke as ever. Forced again to write short stories, he conceded temporary defeat in a sheepish (but stubbornly hopeful) letter to Linscott: