Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  * This after the place had been hastily vacated by the novelist Richard Yates (age thirteen) and family, since Yates's impecunious sculptor-mother, Dookie, had neglected to pay rent for several months. The Beechwood estate is located near a street named Revolutionary Road—also the title of Yates's first and most famous novel.

  * Spear attended services at the Presbyterian church across the street from Beechtwig, though he played organ for the Episcopal church (All Saints) attended by Cheever and Mrs. Spear. And Spear was, in fact, a decided political conservative. While in Moscow in 1964, Cheever took the trouble to send his friend a postcard—“Please don't vote for Goldwater”—to no avail.

  † In the fullness of time, Cheever would become very bored with Spear's incessant talk about his Yankee progenitors, but at first he was delighted and even used the journals of Spear's grandfather Hezekiah Prince to flesh out bits of maritime lore in The Wapshot Chronicle.

  * The trip to Concord took place in April 1954, around the time Cheever had begun writing the final version of The Wapshot Chronicle, early fragments of which he'd shown to Maxwell. Thus he refers to his mother as “Mrs. Wapshot” and himself as “Coverly,” as he did habitually in his journal.

  * Cheever had a mildly retarded cousin, Robert Devereaux Young (one of Aunt Liley's children), who was then running a freight elevator at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel—where Jane Cheever made her debut. “Life's little ironies,” John's mother remarked.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  {1952-1954}

  DURING THAT UNPRODUCTIVE SUMMER of 1952, Cheever tried to get a job writing for television (“because poor little Benjy is dressed in rags”), though he loathed the prospect. “The only thing to come my way so far is a husband & wife show,” he wrote Herbst, “in which the humor begins with the fact that their name is Arbuckle. Fuck ‘em.” A few months later, something a little better came along: an adaptation for CBS of Clarence Day's Life with Father and Life with Mother, which had been successfully adapted as both a play and movie by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The producer of the proposed series, Ezra Stone, had been explicitly seeking a New Yorker writer who could evoke the memoir's genteel urban milieu, and finally picked Cheever when St. Clair McKelway and Patricia Collinge turned him down.

  Cheever was paired with an experienced writer of radio sitcoms, John Whedon (“a quiet man with a twinkle, very like Cheever,” Stone remembered), and soon the two finished a pilot script and were summoned to a story conference with the playwrights Lindsay and Crouse, as well as Clarence Day's widow—all of whom (especially Mrs. Day) had a number of “long-winded suggestions” to make on how to improve the script. “I don't recall whether or not [Whedon and I] exchanged notes but we certainly exchanged glances,” Cheever wrote thirty years later for TV Guide, “and at the end of an hour we stood and said—in unison—that to adapt Clarence Day's memoirs to accommodate eight [sic] vastly dissimilar interpretations of the book was a project we did not wish to undertake. We left, slamming the door. So ended my experience with commercial television.” In fact, Cheever and Whedon obligingly revised their script at least six times, but as it happened Stone had other writers working on the pilot, and a different script was eventually used. Cheever was paid a nominal sum for his trouble, and ultimately the project was taken out of Stone's hands and moved to the West Coast, where the show was produced for a couple of mediocre years. As Cheever told Dick Cavett in 1978, the last he heard from CBS was when someone called to insist he return his copies of Life with Father and Life with Mother.

  One consolation (as well as a source of further dread) was that a second collection of stories, The Enormous Radio, was about to be published in the spring of 1953. Two years before, Cheever had broached the idea of a new collection with Linscott, who looked over some tear sheets and thought the stories “stand reading and rereading wonderfully well,” but wanted to wait until they could be published “in connection with the novel.” Cheever (who knew, of course, just how long such a wait might turn out to be) found an English publisher, Victor Gollancz, who was willing to split production costs with Random House. Linscott still resisted, however, and finally Cheever requested permission to cast about “for an improvident publisher.” This proved to be Funk & Wagnalls, the encyclopedia people, who were “looking around desperately for the beginnings of a trade list,” as Cheever noted.

  For The Enormous Radio, Cheever selected fourteen strong stories which had been published since the war, at least two of them arguably classics (the title story and “Goodbye, My Brother”).* Cheever was adamant about publishing the collection for two main reasons: he wanted to build a reputation outside The New Yorker that only a book could bring, and (perhaps more important, given his recent creative setbacks) he wanted to know where he stood as a writer—that is, to find out what serious critics thought of his work, “to get a clearer idea of where [the stories] fail and where they [don't] and to get some measure of the increase in breadth I should aim at.” Naturally he expected the worst. Having sent galleys “to old, tender-hearted, soft-brained friends” in hope of getting a few blurbs, he inferred from a brief silence that he was being snubbed, and remarked that he might “have to fall back on old Spigelgass” (what with the man's delight in his “childlike sense of wonder”). It might have seemed a good sign that he was interviewed for Harvey Breit's column in the New York Times Book Review, but after their lunch together Cheever fretted in his journal that he'd behaved in an “unstable” and “indiscreet” manner. On the contrary, he'd come across as a “tough-minded short-story advocate” (so Breit wrote), who considered the novel an “artificial” and “anachronistic” form—not an entirely disinterested apologia, under the circumstances, though actually Cheever's aesthetic ideas had changed very little over the years, reflecting his view of modern life as fragmented and nomadic: “The short story is determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event. The vigorous nineteenth-century novel is based on parish life and lack of communications. … I've always noticed that just as people are about to tell you the secret they're transferred to another city. The way people drop out of sight. Really drop!”

  In that same issue of the Book Review (May 10, 1953) was James Kelly's critique of The Enormous Radio, which was everything Cheever might have hoped for (if he hadn't been so morbidly insecure at the time). Kelly described the stories as “miraculous expressions of life among the middle-class have-not-enoughs,” though he added (as did other critics) that the stories were less impressive when read one after another, as the reader discovered a certain sameness of theme and setting. “But not one can be called insignificant or shoddy or inadequately observed,” Kelly concluded. “No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever.” William Peden, writing in the Saturday Review, was also enthusiastic: “John Cheever shows an absolute genius for taking the usual and transforming it into the significant. … [He] is one of the most undervalued American short story writers.”

  What Cheever was apt to notice most in Peden's review, however, was an incidental remark that his stories were “less spectacular” (albeit more likely to “improve with rereading”) than those of J. D. Salinger, whose Nine Stories was published around the same time to ecstatic acclaim. Indeed, a comparison of the two books was the basis of one of the most wounding reviews of Cheever's career—all the worse given that the reviewer, Arthur Mizener, had become one of the nation's most prominent critics after the recent success of his pioneering Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. Appearing in The New Republic, Mizener's review was framed as an assessment of the “New Yorker story,” which Mizener thought a good thing for the most part: “If their limitations on subject matter are in the long run dangerous to real talent, they nonetheless provide a stiff course in the craft.” As Mizener would have it, Salinger exemplified the Good sort of New Yorker writer—a brilliant craftsman who transcended the “limitations” of the form—and thus his place on the best-seller lists was “as it ought
to be.” Cheever, however (“not a writer of any great talent”), was the Bad sort—an empty craftsman, a craftsman tout court: “Congreve” (wrote Mizener) “once remarked that he selected a moral and then designed a fable to fit it. … It is the glaring fault of Mr. Cheever's stories that they all appear to have been produced in that way.”

  Salinger was a sore point. Five years before, he'd come to Cheever's and everybody else's attention with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which provoked a flurry of letters to the magazine (Why did that man commit suicide?), including one to Lobrano from Cheever (“one hell of a story”). At measured intervals Salinger continued to publish such stories, and then became wildly popular with his novel, The Catcher in the Rye. On the one hand, Cheever deeply admired Salinger's particular gifts, his “excellent and supple” prose, and eventually pressed a copy of Nine Stories on his daughter; on the other hand, he thought there was something precious and contrived about Holden and the whole Glass family, and liked to remark, maliciously, that “Jerry” (Salinger) wouldn't let anybody make a movie of Catcher because he was too old to play Holden. And later, as Salinger's work became more meandering and eccentric, Cheever began to suspect the man was “very close to crazy.”

  Crazy or not, he'd written a novel (a novel!) that was already considered a modern classic, and his story collection was a best seller and would remain in print forever, whereas The Enormous Radio sold a few thousand and vanished—though not before its author was abused in the daily Times for being a misanthrope*: “Listening to this cacophony of hatred and despair,” William DuBois wrote, “one harassed reader could only wonder if the human race, as Mr. Cheever views it, is worth saving.” This rankled; as Cheever complained to Herbst, it was an “appalling” state of affairs “to find the self-designated intellectuals urging one to cheerup, cheerup and take the world for what it appears to be.” At the same time he suspected that on some level they were probably right, and, despite a mostly favorable reception for The Enormous Radio, he saw “harsh and bitter years” ahead: “You may never get into the rose garden.”

  “I AM SO PROUD OF MY FAMILY,” Cheever wrote in 1952. “I love to walk with them on a Sunday.” Nothing made him feel closer to his ideal self than the role of paterfamilias, and he often remarked that the most important thing was to have children—”to procreate.” “I suppose the happiest days of my life,” he later wrote a friend, “were the days when Susie, Ben and Fred stepped into it.” “He had a strong maudlin streak,” said his younger son, who pointed out that Cheever was particularly drawn to scenes evoking “a basic Norman Rockwell image.” Susan and her friend Sarah Schoales, for instance, would write playlets and perform them in front of the fireplace, while Cheever attended with a rapt look (“very riveted”) and applauded vigorously. Perhaps inspired by such wholesome entertainments, he initiated a “very pleasant ritual” every Sunday evening whereby members of the family would recite poems they'd memorized during the week. In fact, it was the ritualistic side of family life that he seemed to like best, and nowhere was this more evident than at dinnertime: Mary cooked while Susan set the table, and once the food was arranged in serving dishes, Cheever said a formalized grace. Expanded for special occasions, it began with a bit of Cranmer (“Almighty God, maker of all things, judge of all men!”), followed perhaps by a more specific petition (“bless this table with peace”), and invariably including what became a mantra of sorts for Cheever—a quote from Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato that he'd altered slightly to suit his own needs: “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with one another and with God.”*

  Ben Cheever has a vague memory of being kissed or nuzzled by his father and feeling the bristles of his beard, but once he got a little older there wasn't much in the way of nuzzling. “Physical contact was not encouraged in our family” Susan recalled. “On parting, we aimed kisses at one another's cheeks, and there were brief hugs for special occasions. We shook hands a lot.” Meanwhile, at her best friend Sarah's house, people were forever hugging and sitting on laps, which might explain why Susan tried to stay over as often as possible. Perhaps it also had something to do with Cheever's “thunderous rage” one night when she stayed for dinner without asking permission; the Schoaleses were so alarmed—Cheever had called their house, demanding his daughter come home at once—that they followed by car while Susan (nine or ten at the time) frantically pedaled home on her bicycle. As for the ritual poetry readings—as for rituals, period—partly they served to stave off the malaise that descended in their absence: “I wondered last night why the hours between five and eight, when we have supper, are so intensely uncomfortable,” Cheever wrote. “Why do I have to stupify [sic] myself with gin to see them pass.”

  Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl.” Cheever was pitiless in judging female beauty—”You were either a dish or a drudge,” his wife repeatedly insisted—and when the young Susan failed to measure up, he was bewildered and sorry for all concerned. He'd wanted a “frail daughter,” after all, a “wraith” with long blond hair who drove a sports car and went by the kicky name of Susie. In any event they did call her Susie, but to Cheever's mind the name didn't jibe with the hoyden who chewed with her mouth open and said all the wrong things (“How long does it take to hang a man?”): “The tragic instant”—Cheever wrote, during a bad patch when his daughter was all of eight—“when a parent loses faith with his child.”

  “They were completely unable to cope with me,” said Susan Cheever, after some fifty years of blessed retrospect. The main issue, as her parents always saw it, was her weight—if only she looked right, everything else would follow—and in a way that was true, since they harassed her so relentlessly on the subject that her behavior was mostly a matter of reprisal. They put her on diets, made her eat Ayds candies to cut her appetite, and kept up a constant running commentary on what she ate at dinner. Every so often, too, they'd invite her grossly obese pediatrician to the house so he could deliver a stern lecture to the little girl on the evils of overeating. Deprived of snacks and the like, Susan took to stealing food (and therefore eating many times what she would have eaten normally): she hollowed out cakes they were saving for company (leaving a “veneer of icing on top”); she rooted around in drawers, closets, and desks, searching for hidden chocolate and whatever else she could find. “They had no privacy,” she said. “I read everything in the house, I was in every secret compartment of every desk, I became like a little criminal. I was lying, I was cheating, I was stealing. Their cruelty about my weight was not one-way. We were in a dance of death on that subject.” Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers: “And I remember, as a father, how ruefully I separated my daughter from her crackers and cheese when all she sought, by stuffing herself, was to understand her place in the world.”

  At the time he didn't see it that way; rather he regarded himself as a loving, well-meaning, long-suffering father who was simply trying to talk his only daughter out of being fat, whereas she in turn responded with unsavory remarks and tics such as banging her head against the wall and constantly sucking her thumb. She wasn't doing well in school either, and finally (at age eleven) they sent her to a psychiatrist in White Plains named Dr. Sobel. Apparently the man didn't see what all the fuss was about—certainly the girl was intelligent enough (“She has a Cadillac motor in there,” he observed). The parents were another matter: Dr. Sobel remarked that Mary was a “passive” personality, which (he opined) was why Cheever had married her, whereupon the affronted husband rose from his chair and stood protectively beside his wife. In his own version of the meeting, however, Cheever tended to omit that detail, informing Susan that what Sob
el had really said (furtively taking him aside) was: “Be careful. If anyone looked at me the way your wife looked at your daughter, I'd suck my thumb too!”

  Then as later, Cheever had his own way of seeing things, or at least of telling them. Around that time, he sent his daughter to summer camp (Kaiora) in Piermont, New Hampshire, about thirty-five miles north of Treetops. After visiting for a parents’ weekend, he painted a desolate picture for Maxwell's benefit:

  [Susan's] smile was broad and forced. She kept seizing my hand and saying: “I'm participating in everything, Daddy.” She was shrill. … We watched her swim, stuff a balsam pillow, row a boat, play box-hockey and plunge into a game of kick ball in which she was the only enthusiastic participant (several of the players hid under the lodge) and the last member of the team—when it began to rain—to give up. … Then [after saying goodbye] Susie called after me and I went back. She was not crying but her eyes were full of tears. “You understand Daddy, don't you,” she said “that I am homesick every minute of the day.” I said that I did. … On Saturday Susie was to be in a play so we returned to see this. She smiled at us from the stage, sang Green Grow the Rushes Oh with a choir, kissed us lightly and ran off with a little girl named Justine Eliot. I've never seen her so happy.