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Cheever

Page 33

by Blake Bailey


  IN SEPTEMBER, Cheever published his third collection, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, a slender volume of eight stories that yet included some of his best work: “The Country Husband,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “O Youth and Beauty!,” and “The Sorrows of Gin.” Cheever had reservations about the book (“it is a nothing, turkey warmed over in some instances, four times”), though it stands as an important artifact of the postwar era—as Jonathan Yardley would observe some forty-six years later, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill is the work of a great writer at the height of his powers, who at the time had “rivals but no superiors in the national literature.” Contemporary reviewers also had a sense of Cheever's growing significance. Herbert Mitgang praised his “beautiful control” in the daily Times, while William Peden observed in the Book Review that Cheever “is one of the most urbane moralists of our times; he is also one of the most entertaining story tellers.” A few reviewers, however, suspected there was something a little vapid about the work—most insistently Richard Gilman, calling Cheever (in Commonweal) a “culture-hero to the barbecue and Volkswagen set” who was, whatever his satirical gifts and fine prose, “essentially a sentimentalist”: “It is all adolescent at bottom and not simply because Cheever is portraying a world of adolescent values,” Gilman concluded. “In the end he shares them.” This is harsh and simplistic, though not entirely without justice. In his lesser stories, at least, Cheever was more and more apt to finesse his own ambivalence—toward almost everything, but especially traditional suburban values—with a lot of mystifying irony. In “The Worm in the Apple,”* for example, Cheever appears to mock his own occasional pessimism. Examining the case of the (seemingly) contented Crutch-mans—who engage in all the trite, neighborly diversions—the narrator looks for unsavory truths but finally suggests that the “worm” may be “in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of [the Crutchmans’] natural enthusiasms.” The story concludes with a line that might be interpreted one way or the other, echoing the final line of that bottomlessly ambiguous novel, Bullet Park, published ten years later: “they got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily.”

  The tone is a bit shrill, perhaps reflecting the exasperation of a man who (at least for a while) wanted to write about something other than the suburban middle class—or not at all: “I seem unable to get my hands on anything,” he noted almost six months after returning from Rome. “It may be a question of discipline but why write about things that bore and disinterest me.” More than anything, he wanted to get on with another novel, but at the moment he was completely out of ideas and couldn't afford it besides: The Wapshot Chronicle had sold better than expected, but it wasn't enough “to keep a family of five in shoe-leather,” as he remarked to Herbst. Writing for money as opposed to pleasure, then, he regurgitated more Italian material into a long story titled “Boy in Rome,” about a young American who remains in Rome because his father is buried in the Protestant cemetery there. At one point the narrator breaks frame and makes his own boredom explicit with a rambling parenthetical digression: “(But I am not a boy in Rome but a grown man in the old prison and river town of Ossining,† swatting hornets on this autumn afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper. … But my father taught me, while we hoed the beans, that I should complete for better or worse whatever I had begun and so we get back to the scene where [the boy] leaves the train for Naples.)” This curious bit of metafiction seems less a formal innovation than a frank admission of failure, and though Cheever regarded the story as “close to parody,” the fact remained that he'd worked on it for six weeks and wanted money for his trouble—hence, a little reluctantly, he sent the thing to Maxwell, who seemed almost startled by its badness: “[It] doesn't work, everybody feels. … I guess what it is is that you really don't care what [the boy] does with his passport or himself. One doesn't, the reader doesn't, meaning, surely, you didn't. And all the other ingredients—the palace, the expatriate mother and so on, are from other stories of yours.” Cheever apologized (“I have not written so feebly in eight years”), though in fact he was offended by Maxwell's tone—and, feeble parody or not, he allowed “Boy in Rome” to circulate among seven magazines (at least) before finally dumping it on Esquire for a thousand dollars.

  One problem was that Cheever's life had simply become more distracting. The little house was crowded now with a crying baby and a flamboyant maid, while the telephone rang more frequently, too, what with Cheever's growing celebrity. As a young man starting out in the Depression, he'd gotten used to writing wherever he could find a flat surface, and was never pompous about the trappings of his profession: he worked in odd spare rooms and seemed almost to welcome distractions such as runaway mice or the arrival of a drinking companion. Amid one of the worst slumps in his career, though, Cheever decided he could use a little more privacy after all, and rented a room over a real-estate office near the train station. This entailed a short walk each day in his working uniform of “wash pants” and seedy crewneck sweaters (one or the other usually torn), and presently he was stopped by police on suspicion of vagrancy. Cheever was furious, and refused to give his name or address. “I do not like to have this slight irregularity in my habits misinterpreted,” he fumed in his journal.

  Under the circumstances, Cheever was drinking more heavily than ever, and this made him peevish about things. To the Blumes he confided that the gist of his recent journal entries was as follows: “Drank too much; talked too much or just: Drank too much or sometimes Drank too much; very choleric. I don't do anything about this because as I tell Mary it's the way I feel about life.” More often than not, he awoke in a condition of physical and emotional distress: his hands shook, his kidneys ached, and he felt a depressive anxiety about everything and nothing—his family was in danger, financial ruin was imminent, and what was that smell of smoke (was the house on fire)? Such a “liverish grasp of disaster” could only be relieved by one thing—another drink—and Cheever found himself longing for the “noontime snort” in the middle of the morning. The prospect of mixing with friends was another source of thirst, which in turn had a corrosive effect on his genial public persona. “Phil [Boyer] leaves without saying either thank you or good night,” he wrote in his journal. “He has often done this before, but tonight I have no patience and when he calls to apologize I tell him he is an ill-mannered bore.” Cheever also ticked the man off for drinking up his liquor, tracking “dog-shit all over [his] rugs,” and making “dirty passes at [his] wife.” The next morning, however, he awoke feeling “confused and sad” and eager to make amends.

  Such “choleric” outbursts were a minor loss of control, as Cheever saw it, next to the ghastly possibility of succumbing to “certain forms of concupiscence.” Thus, in the early phases of drunkenness at least (and depending on the company), Cheever had come to seem even more fretful, shy, and constrained than the mannerly person he was when sober. “He became physically self-conscious, as though he were feeling a sensuality he was at pains to conceal,” said Michael Bessie, who'd suspected from the beginning that Cheever was bisexual. Given his restless, questing libido, combined with worsening alcoholism, Cheever had begun to worry it was only a matter of time before he disgraced himself in some public way. One morning, after a literary party in Connecticut, he vaguely remembered meeting William Styron and feeling “unselfconsciously happy”—but now, hungover, he felt only a strange misgiving he couldn't explain to himself. Styron, however, remembered the encounter vividly: With a “kind of urgency in his voice,” Cheever had proposed the two go for a walk, and Styron (tactfully declining) had the definite impression the older man was “putting the make” on him. In any event, drunk or sober, Cheever's ultimate prophylactic was to remind himself that he was, above all, a father—loath to give his sons any reason to think such conduct was “acceptable”: “Walking around New York in a condition of intense harassment my principal anxiety is that my sons may walk on the same street
s and experience the same pain.”

  He was also a husband, and his constant intoxication was taking a further toll on his marriage. “I am a solitary drunkard,” he wrote in the summer of 1958.

  I take a little painkiller before lunch but I don't really get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools. After half a glass of gin I decide that I must get a divorce—and, to tell the truth, Mary is depressed, although my addiction to gin may have something to do with her low spirits. The gin flows freely until supper and so do my memories of the most difficult passages in our marriage; and I think of all the letters I have received from literary ladies implying that my experience with the sex must have been unnaturally difficult and that I deserve better. How right they are, I think. … So the gin flows, and after supper the whiskey. I am even a little sly, keeping my glass on the floor where it might not be seen. Mary does not want to speak to me, to be sure. Her looks are dark and impatient. I rustle up a glossary of little jokes to prove the sweetness of my disposition, but she does not laugh. She does not even listen. She does not want to be in the same room with me.

  In moments of middling sobriety, at least, Cheever was still able to grasp that his alcoholism “may have something to do” with his wife's depression, but as time passed he was more apt to regard her as “capricious,” and often reminded himself of the insanity in her family. Such instability, he reasoned, would also explain her lack of tenderness in bed: that summer he calculated that she'd rebuffed him (“I ask for what I do not really want and being refused lie contentedly between the sheets”) no fewer than thirty-seven times in a row. “What about the times you couldn't get it up?” she rejoined, lucidly enough, but that was her fault too. She spiked her hair with a lot of uninviting steel curlers; she sighed; she looked “victimized”—and so on. It was just too much trouble: “I think tonight this fortress is not worth the assault, siege, ladder work and sometimes broadsword fighting that might be involved,” he noted.

  As if all that weren't enough, Cheever was also worrying about the Bomb. During a visit to Yaddo, he lay awake thinking “that if the world should end [he] would not be with [his] children.” He thought he detected an “unearthly green light” in the west, and was almost convinced that atomic testing had ruptured the atmosphere, both physical and moral: “The most useful image I have today is of a man in a quagmire,” he wrote that year, “looking into a tear in the sky. … Something has gone very wrong, and I do not have the language, the imagery, or the concepts to describe my apprehensions. I come back again to the quagmire and the torn sky.” The “quagmire” was the nihilism that followed from a sense of imminent doom. Reading manuscripts for a fiction contest at Barnard, Cheever was astonished by the decadence—impotent rapists, sadistic homosexuals, and the like—contrived by a lot of well-groomed college women, and he wondered how an affluent nation should be “imitating the moral collapse of Germany in the twenties.” Meanwhile he wrote a story that year, “The Wrysons,” about a dull suburban couple who experience the malaise of the nuclear age in terms of their own well-concealed “oddness.” The wife keeps dreaming of the hydrogen bomb, while the husband relieves his own elusive dread by baking (furtively, late at night) Lady Baltimore cakes, since he has no other interests or inner life to speak of. One night the couple's oddnesses converge: the husband falls asleep and burns his cake, while the wife smells smoke and thinks the world is ending. “ ‘The Wrysons’ very bad,” Cheever reflected, finding his prose “complacent” and the story itself “nasty, nothing more.” Nevertheless the little satire was a telling indication of things to come.

  A year that began in triumph ended in a Westchester hospital room, where Cheever spent New Year's Eve “in the company of a dozen faded roses” (sent by Maxwell) “and a copy of La Garabaldina [sic].” For years now he'd referred to himself as “an old man, nearing the end of his journey,” and when a “rotten headcold” persisted for a few weeks, the forty-six-year-old Cheever began to feel sorry for himself in earnest: “Mary's love of me does not seem to include my infirmities,” he wrote Weaver. “She seems lost in some race memory where primitive men, once they began to sniffle, stripped themselves naked, lay down in the snow and let themselves be eaten by crows.” It was almost a relief, then, when the doctor assured him he had “something as manly and straightforward as virus pneumonia,” though it was perhaps too much of a good thing when X-rays showed a large spot on his lung that seemed to indicate a resurgent case of tuberculosis. Cheever noted in his journal that he'd made “all the arrangements for his death,” but soon the spot cleared and he was left convalescing with Maxwell's roses.

  Alone with his thoughts, Cheever brooded over his recent refusal to write a blurb in behalf of Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair. “He seems to me an unusually gifted young man,” he wrote the Knopf publicist, “but perhaps not as a novelist. His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” Cheever had kept an eye on Updike ever since the latter's stories had begun appearing in The New Yorker in 1954; he told his Barnard students that Updike was one of the most promising writers of his generation, though almost in the same breath he remarked that Updike seemed a bit too talented—”too pretty”—for his own good. But in the hospital his better nature kept reproaching him, and he couldn't resist writing a second note to the publicist: although, alas, his opinion of the novel hadn't changed, for the sake of his own “peace of mind” he wanted to reiterate that he considered Updike “unusually brilliant.” And to Maxwell (their common editor at the The New Yorker) he also wrote of his troubled conscience, repeating that he'd been “disappointed” by The Poorhouse Fair but had liked Updike's most recent story in the magazine—except, that is, for “the shaven armpits of the poor girls playing pingpong. One should never remark idly on the armpits of ladies.” Such a punctilio went to the heart of a certain dialectic between the writers. For Updike's part, his first published story in the magazine, “Friends from Philadelphia,” had been conceived as a riposte to “O Youth and Beauty!”: “I thought to myself, ‘There must be more to American life than this,’ “ Updike remembered, “and wrote an upbeat little story, with an epiphanic benefaction at the end, to prove it.” When the story was “accepted into that exalted fold,” Updike felt a sense of debt to Cheever for having provided “the crystallizing spark;” Cheever, meanwhile, continued to brood over the uses to which Updike put his gifts, to say nothing of how those gifts compared with his own.

  “It was nice while you were away to have a dry toilet seat,” his wife greeted him when he returned from the hospital, or so he reminded himself whenever he was feeling especially ill-used. Mostly he wondered how he might deploy such a perfect insult in his fiction. Again and again he weighed it for this or that story or novel, until finally, almost twenty years later, he gave it to Farragut's despicable wife in Falconer.

  AT LOW POINTS in his drinking career—whenever he made one of his children cry, for instance—Cheever would reflect on his brother's decline and wonder at how little he, John, seemed to be learning from Fred's example. The latter was seven years older, and his alcoholism was accordingly more advanced. Fred's phobias were such (John claimed) that he could scarcely board an airplane or go higher than the seventh floor of a building unless he was “pissed.” Also, because of the shakes, he'd come to dread business dinners where he was served soft drinks rather than cocktails: “I [used to] sit at a table with a bunch of big shots and be afraid to pick up the tomato juice,” he wrote John in 1967, ten years after he'd been fired by Pepperell. His dismissal was if anything belated. Apart from his obvious drinking problem, Fred had become openly contemptuous of the whole “corporate freeze,” as he called it. Like many drunks, he had a grandiose view of himself, and indeed was not without a certain intellectual flair. One day in the late fifties, John and Susan bumped into Fred at Gra
nd Central Station; the brothers had been somewhat out of touch since Fred's move to Connecticut, and so repaired to a dark bar, briefly, to catch up. Susan, a perceptive teenager by then, was struck by her uncle's “brilliance”: “It was August, and Fred said, ‘Oh my God. I've just been up to the Frick, because when you look at those Constables, it really cools you off “ John, however, seemed uneasy at the thought of his tipsy, idle brother whiling away an afternoon at the Frick, and soon made excuses to part.

  Now a “freelance advertiser,” Fred had become all the more determined to prove the world wrong. He'd revised and expanded A Song for These States—his paean to Yankee individualism, begun some twenty years before—and kept a copy of the enormous manuscript on his desk even as it was rejected again and again. At the same time, he seemed more thrilled than ever at his brother's success: they were both Cheevers, after all. His son David, in college at the time, remembered the “glowing” letter Fred had written when John won the National Book Award: “He had this outward pride,” said David, “but there was a lot of unexpressed conflict, too: why the hell didn't he have talent like that?” Which is not to say Fred despaired of his own talent, or lost faith in his fundamental excellence. His well-to-do neighbors had come to regard him as a drunken misfit, a perception Fred encouraged by drinking more conspicuously than ever and mocking any overture of disapproval or pity with the same “stupid and impenetrable smile on his face,” as John would have it. “I only want to educate my neighbors,” Fred liked to say, though he managed to educate (as in épater) more than his neighbors. Invited to Beechtwig for Thanksgiving in 1958, Fred arrived “like a blast, a thunderclap of obscene misery”: drunk before dinner, he indulged in a lot of fractious jocularity before passing out in a wing chair, whereupon (John observed) “His daughter pitilessly took a photograph of him, asleep with his mouth open.”

 

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