Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Perhaps, but the fact remained that he was impotent, and often drunk before lunch. Finally, in April, he decided to see the Sing Sing psychiatrist, Bernard Glueck, a young man who'd struck him as having a “vigorous mind” when the two met at a party in 1952. Cheever told his wife that he was going because of impotence per se, but with Glueck he openly broached the matter of “homosexual concerns” along with his worsening (and not unrelated) problems with impotence and alcohol. At their first session Glueck was reassuring enough, but Cheever was wary at the prospect of any sort of long-term psychoanalysis. As he wrote in his journal, he found the “atmosphere of the confessional” distasteful, and was hesitant as ever to probe deeply into the past (“to regale myself with my interesting history”). Besides, he was feeling better already, what with the quickening spring weather, and decided after two or three meetings to manage on his own—to accept anxiety as simply the “dread disease of poets.”

  And then he suspected that plenty of nonpoets suffered too. Even among his most prosaic neighbors, he noticed a certain “breakdown of perspective” in middle age: “Bald-headed men” who suddenly took up painting, or played the Moonlight Sonata with their windows open (“this ardent invitation to some lonely chamber-maid”). Any one of them might slip along the tightrope of propriety: commit adultery, seduce the babysitter, “bugger the tree surgeon,” but (in most cases) they didn't—Cheever didn't—because “to do any of these things would so damage the health of my self-esteem that I would be dealing with the obscenities of death.” Or, as he put it in the story he began to write, “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.” When at last Cheever finished “The Country Husband”—almost three months after his first tentative notes—he was so exalted that he drove at once to Maxwell's house in Yorktown Heights, to wait while his editor (ill with bronchitis) read the manuscript in bed. Maxwell would always remember his own sense of “rapture.”

  “To begin at the beginning” (the story opens), Francis Weed is rocked out of his daily torpor with a picturesque airplane crash on the first page of the story. The airplane goes down through “a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires,” while the only sound is that of the pilot “singing faintly, ‘I've got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence. …’ “ Not only does Francis survive, but the whole incident is made to seem immediately unreal. Returning to New York (the crash was outside Philadelphia), he encounters his old friend Trace Bearden on the train to Shady Hill, but the man can scarcely credit that Francis has been in a weather-related crash, since, after all, that late-September day in New York is as “fragrant and shapely as an apple.” As for Mrs. Weed and their children, they are too “absorbed in their own antagonisms” to give Francis a proper greeting, much less listen to his story about miraculously escaping death. Indeed, when Francis asks his wife if they might try eating dinner apart from their squabbling children, the woman brings him crashing back to earth in a different sense: “Julia's guns are loaded for this. She can't cook two dinners and lay two tables. She paints with lightning strokes that panorama of drudgery in which her youth, her beauty, and her wit have been lost.” Meanwhile the spirit of anarchy—embodied by a black retriever named Jupiter—frolics amid the staid gardens of Shady Hill: “Jupiter crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.”

  Such is the banality of Francis's life—his Weedness—that the airplane crash might have been forgotten and everything restored to normal, were it not for a subsequent encounter that piques his memory and leaves his senses “dilated” (momentously for one so absorbed in the quotidian present: “He had not developed his memory as a sentimental faculty. Wood smoke, lilac, and other such perfumes did not stir him, and his memory was something like his appendix—a vestigial repository”). At an otherwise unremarkable dinner party, Francis recognizes the housemaid as a woman he saw in France during the war. Punished for fraternizing with Germans, she had had her head shaved and was forced to strip naked in the public square. Aglow with the strangeness of that memory—of that whole incongruously vivid time—Francis goes home to find their usual babysitter, a crone, replaced by a lovely seventeen-year-old named Anne Murchison. The girl begins sobbing in his car because of a nasty exchange with her drunken father, and Francis tries to comfort her: “The layers of their clothing felt thin, and when her shuddering began to diminish, it was so much like a paroxysm of love that Francis lost his head and pulled her roughly against him.” At first the girl seems shocked and pulls away, but at her door she kisses him “swiftly,” and Francis falls in love.

  Such a love will not end well, of course, but for a while Francis is a man risen from the dead (or for that matter “a punching bag for the beauty and virility of the world”). The next morning he stands tingling on the platform, waiting for his train, when he sees “an extraordinary thing”: in a passing window, a beautiful nude sits in her roomette “combing and combing” her golden hair. Ecstatically Francis watches the vision pass, when suddenly he's visited by an emissary from Shady Hill—old Mrs. Wrightson, who wants to talk about her quest for the right sort of curtains. “I know what to do with them,” Francis finally interrupts her. “What?” “Paint them black on the inside, and shut up.” This exhilarating exchange proves the high point of Francis's rebellion. As his furious wife reminds him, Mrs. Wrightson wields a terrible power in the village—she decides which girls will go to the assemblies—and by insulting her Francis has consigned them all to pariah-dom. Worse, it turns out that Anne Murchison is engaged to a pimply youth named Clayton, who for good measure lectures Francis on the shortcomings of the life to which he's doomed to return: “[Shady Hill] doesn't have any future. So much energy is spent in perpetuating the place—in keeping out undesirables and so forth—that the only idea of the future anyone has is just more and more commuting trains and more parties. I don't think that's healthy.” At last the abject Francis is driven to confess his love to a psychiatrist, Dr. Herzog, who advises him to console himself with woodwork; ten days later he's in the cellar building a coffee table. “Francis is happy,” the narrator announces, with vertiginous irony.

  And so the story winds down with a last, virtuosic montage of Shady Hill at twilight: a wistful neighbor, Donald Goslin, goes on playing the Moonlight Sonata with excessive rubato; little Toby Weed pretends to be a spaceman; the naked, aging Babcocks race around their hedge-screened terrace (“as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice”); an evocative cat hobbles onto the scene “securely buttoned into a doll's dress, from the skirts of which protrudes its long hairy tail.” Finally Jupiter reappears: “He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

  Cheever wrote this “arty ending” (as he called it) out of sequence, in a flash of inspiration, and felt that he'd perfectly synthesized the disparate elements of an exquisitely intricate story.* Some have criticized the ending as anticlimactic and evasive, but of course Cheever was rarely interested in resolving the loose ends of a neat linear plot; rather he sought to compose a harmonic set of impressions, in this case a picture of the suburbs rendered in a spirit of “love and charity” that yet reflected “the real limitations in such a community.” Francis is thwarted and properly so, though he finds a drop of (ambiguous) comfort in woodwork; meanwhile Jupiter prances free, as do the Babcocks, and after all it's a kingly night of (almost) infinite possibilities. In later years, Cheever wasn't averse to pointing out that Nabokov, no less, had mentioned “The Country Husband” as one of his “half-a-dozen particular favorites,” explaining its mechanism in very agreeable terms: “The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.”

  At the
end of that difficult year, then, Cheever could take comfort in having made better and better art out of a supposedly neurotic outlook, and there were more tangible rewards as well. “The Country Husband” won first prize in the O. Henry Awards, and was also included in Best American Short Stories (and finally adapted as a feature-length film for Playhouse 90 on CBS—this while Cheever was mercifully in Italy: “I saw a script before we sailed,” he wrote the Boyers. “They changed everything but the title”). Around that time, too, he went to Washington to receive the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award for best story of 1954: “The Five-Forty-Eight.” For the moment, at least, he stood at the top of his genre, and in the midst of such eminence he visited his mother in Quincy “I read in the newspaper that you won a prize,” she remarked. “Yes, mother,” he replied, “I didn't tell you about it because it wasn't terribly important to me.” “No,” said the old woman, “it wasn't to me either.”

  *”The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” was not included, since it hadn't appeared in print yet.

  * And what about Salinger's misanthropy?—so Cheever may have protested. After reading “Seymour: An Introduction,” he wrote a monitory note in his journal: “I am reminded of the bitterness in my own work, that bitterness that is not art but that is its opposite. So I would like to write a story that is all yellow, yellow, yellow, the brightest yellow.”

  * Jowett's actual words: “Wherefore my counsel is that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods …” Cheever's version says nothing about justice and virtue.

  *”The Chimera” (1961).

  *”If I have to go,” Cheever wrote a friend in October, “I'm going to go as the late Warren G. Harding.” In fact, he went as a Chinese acrobat, or so he claimed twenty years later; Mary was “the seven-eyed Sybil.”

  * With such a passage in mind, Cheever once wrote that he knew “no greater pleasure” than drawing together disparate incidents in fiction “so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.” When he later taught writing, one of his favorite assignments was to have students take seven or eight dissimilar things and put them into a coherent scheme.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  {1954-1956}

  TOWARD THE END OF THE SUMMER in 1954, Cheever got a telephone call from the poet Paul Engle at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop: would he like to come out and teach for a year? Cheever—longing once again to leave Westchester (“even if I were traveling in the wrong direction”)—enthusiastically accepted the offer. Then he waited. Finally, a brief note arrived, explaining the position had been filled. “Mary thinks that the University called the New Yorker and asked for Jean Stafford's telephone number and got mine by mistake,” he wrote Herbst. Still, the idea had been planted, and so (“to vary this landscape somewhat”) he accepted a job at Barnard, beginning in January 1955, to teach a single two-hour writing class every Monday afternoon.

  At first Cheever was intimidated by his small group of honor students. He'd never taught his own class and had no degree, and for a while he found himself wasting time at his writing desk “giving imaginary lectures”—some of them rather abstruse: “[F]or the Barnard girls” (he reminded himself in his journal) “there is the statement that writing fills in that discrepancy between what we mean to be and what we are; between our very real vision of life and its possibilities and those experiences that gall us.” True enough, though what stuck in his students’ minds were his more down-to-earth insights. He mentioned, for example, that it would be much harder for them to pursue writing as a career than it had been for him in the Depression, when it “wasn't a crime” to be a writer without a job—that said, they needn't act like bohemians to succeed, and he warned them explicitly against sleeping with editors (particularly at The New Yorker). Privately Cheever wondered at his own sententiousness, and one night, brooding as usual, he suddenly realized it was a “mistake” to take the job so seriously.

  Cheever's students remember him as helpful, modest, and soft-spoken. Sometimes he'd give them assignments (“Write a description of Richard Nixon”), but mostly he was content to read his own work and listen to theirs. “Most of the girls are so subtle you can't tell whether the characters are alive or dead and there is a good deal of loneliness and moonshine, etc.,” he wrote Eleanor Clark, though in the classroom he kept his sarcasm in check. Which is not to say he wasn't critical when warranted. One woman liked to write erotica, and Cheever would listen to her stories with a polite poker-face—evidently finding them distasteful, but willing to be patient. He raised one mild objection, however, when she described a man abruptly withdrawing his penis and thus forgoing climax: “There is no recorded instance in history when a man was able to do this,” he said. It was a fairly typical observation. Regardless of what they chose to write—and generally Cheever thought it a good idea for them to write what they knew—he insisted that characters behave in a plausible manner, and (reminiscent of Harold Ross) that the reality of a story be made accessible to readers with vivid, specific detail. One of his students, Judith Sherwin (who'd already published a poem in the Atlantic*), wanted to write something akin to magical realism, and thought Cheever's strictures precluded this. But of course Cheever was no stranger to magical realism; he simply insisted that, while revising, Sherwin “put in a few signposts”—that is, the kind of details that make up a believable world.

  Mostly his students adored him. They balked when he asked them to memorize “Fern Hill” for its lovely cadence; a week later, though, three of his best students came to his office and recited the poem in unison. Such moments made it almost worthwhile, but not quite: teaching was too much effort (“[it] takes the skin off your back”), no matter how relaxed his approach. Besides, his novel was finally taking off and he resented distractions of any kind, especially the muddling static of apprentice prose. Toward the end of his second and last term, he was doing little more as a teacher than reading aloud from The Wapshot Chronicle—not that his students seemed to mind. As one remarked, “It was an honor to be sitting there, at age nineteen, with this writer on the cusp of greatness.”

  Such greatness was the result of a truly mulish persistence. After his last, disastrous meeting with Linscott in March 1952, Cheever had very nearly given up the idea of ever writing a novel at all. “I think maybe I might stick with short stories,” he wrote, then immediately proceeded to argue with himself: he'd never make any real money as a short-story writer, or establish a durable reputation; a novel was “massive, longlived,” whereas the short story “has the life expectancy of a mayfly.” Still, a long year would pass before he could dust himself off and try again. “It's been my intention for the last twenty-five years to complete a sustained piece of fiction and I feel sure that I will,” he wrote Linscott in early 1953, adding, however, that he'd abandoned his previous draft in toto after the editor's scathing appraisal, and hadn't made any progress since.

  To Cowley he reiterated the necessity of writing a novel—as a career imperative, if nothing else—but complained that he found the genre “bankrupt.” Cowley replied that perhaps he shouldn't try to write a “conventional” novel at all, but rather pursue one of the alternatives Cowley had mentioned before: namely, either write what amounted to a long short-story—”take some situation like the one you treated in Goodbye, My Brother and work back (not forward) till the characters assumed their full roundness”—or else take two or three stories “and weave them together.” The latter method evidently struck a chord with Cheever, but structure wasn't his only problem. There was also the question of tone: “[t]he irresistable attraction [that] satire, irony, the memory of Fielding have for me,” he
wrote, having made a breakthrough of sorts with the darkly exuberant “O Youth and Beauty!” With a somewhat Fieldingesque treatment in mind, then, he wrote “The National Pastime” in the summer of 1953—an attempt to recast Leander in a more comic, malevolent mode. This was the father he was never able to “requite”: the gruff, distant old man who refused to play baseball with him; the self-absorbed zany who wore a fez and read to his cat. In the story, Leander writes in his will, “ ‘To my changeling son, Eben … the author of all my misfortunes, I leave my copy of Shakespeare, a hacking cough …’ The list was long and wicked [the narrator-son observes] … the piece of paper was evidence of my own defeat.” For the purpose of his novel, though, Cheever preferred to make peace with his father's ghost rather than the opposite, and anyway the wacky, fez-wearing Leander was perhaps too thin to sustain over the course of a long narrative. “[The story] seems like a model of wrongness,” he wrote Maxwell, “although I might be able to use some of it later in a different light.”

  Next he wrote “Mrs. Wapshot,” still another attempt to get his mother down on paper. In her final incarnation in the novel, Sarah Wapshot is a single-minded but essentially pious and gentle woman; the heroine of “Mrs. Wapshot,” however, is much closer to the real-life model (still abiding in Quincy at the time, it bears repeating). “She is a very enterprising woman,” Mr. Wapshot explains to his sons. “She used to go alone to those dark streets in Boston where the rag-pickers were and buy rags by the car-load. When she and her friends had made enough quilts to cover every coolie in China they had a bazaar and sold the quilts for the benefit of the Armenians.” This unpublished story is over thirty pages in manuscript, and the Wapshot cast is still evolving: the father is a gentle apologist for his wife's vagaries, and dies in the early pages; there are three sons—Moses, Coverly, and William—the last a divinity student, while in this version Coverly is based somewhat on the author's piano-playing cousin, Randall Young. At any rate Cheever was not surprised when The New Yorker rejected the story as diffuse (“a series of eddies and whirlpools”). “My plan to write a novel piecemeal seems frustrated,” Cheever wrote.