Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Finally, on his fifty-first birthday, Cheever took a matinal slug of whiskey and gave Maxwell a call: “He seems plainly unenthusiastic about the book if not gravely troubled by its failure. This is the devastation of my most intimate aspirations and dreams.” Doubtless Maxwell sensed as much, and so the kindly man called back a couple days later to say he'd reread the book at once and found it quite wonderful after all (words to that effect). Cheever thanked him effusively, though on reflection he decided to keep the novel's dedication (“For W.M.”) in the vitiated form to which he'd emended it: “The initials are intended to represent the lack between what I mean to write for you and what I produced. If it seems better in galleys I'll add the illiam and the axwell.” But apparently it seemed no better, and so the dedication remained; nor was Cheever ever really persuaded that Maxwell liked the book, and he was right to be skeptical. Ten years after Cheever's death, Maxwell admitted that he'd much preferred the Chronicle “because it is the most realistic”: “[I]n The Wapshot Scandal he began to play ducks and drakes with plausibility and the psychological consistency of his characters … in order to be freer, more fanciful, more didactic, more violent.” Cheever would continue to be less plausible and so forth—as Maxwell would have it—and the rift would continue to widen.

  Facing imminent ruin, or so he thought, Cheever became all the more caustic on the subject of his wife's duties at Briarcliff Junior College, where she'd begun teaching part-time the year before. Once again Cheever invoked Newhouse's wife, Dorothy (the renowned violin teacher), as an example of a working wife who was paid decently, at least, at Juilliard, whereas Mary taught a bunch of debutantes how to spell cat “at an eighth-rate college.” (“Now, John,” she'd reply, “it's a fifth-rate college and you know it.”) The pittance she made, said Cheever, was just enough to force them into a higher tax bracket. (In fact, the pittance—about three thousand dollars a year “at most”—went to Iole for looking after Federico on the two or three mornings a week that Mary taught, while her Watson inheritance continued to pay about ten thousand dollars of their annual expenses.) But of course these were nominal quibbles, beyond which lay an old trauma. “I think again and again and again of the mixed rewards of sexual equality,” Cheever seethed in his journal. “I have been looking at them, it seems, for three generations. Grandmother's love of her children was sparse and capricious she was so busy redeeming whores. Mother's love was chancy, she was so deep in women's club politics. And now M[ary] going off to teach freshman English burns the breakfast.” For this she'd relegated her celebrated husband to housewifery while she corrected themes “for her pleasure.” After a bitter stint of babysitting, Cheever felt tainted and even depraved: “I read Hannah Arendt on the repulsive moral chaos in Fascist Germany and turn these facts back on myself. I am the immoralist, and my failure has been the toleration of an intolerable marriage. My fondness for pleasant interiors and the voices of children has destroyed me.” The banality of evil indeed.

  It was true Mary could be strident about “women's liberation” (a rather novel topic in 1963, even among the liberal middle class), until her exasperated husband would flee to Shady Lane Farm and commiserate with Barolini, who had similar problems with his American wife. She wanted to write, he said, she coveted his success, and being Italian he was far more mystified than Cheever: why would a woman not want to care for her husband and children? Cheever explained that American women of their generation were the most miserable in history, terribly bitter about giving away the best years of their lives to marriage, and eager to share their sufferings with men: “[E]ducating an unintellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. She cannot add a column of figures or make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while the dinner burns.” He cited the case of his poor old friend Kenny, reduced to polishing silver while his wife poked away at her opus on the late novels of Henry James. And perhaps he mentioned, too, a time not long ago when Mary (hastening to teach debutantes) had left Federico home alone with a bad cold—or rather she'd left him alone with Cheever, who had his own work to do; her solution was to give the sickly boy a pot lid and wooden spoon with which to signal his father if things took a turn for the worse.

  Such were the materials for a vindictive tour-de-force titled “An Educated American Woman,” which appeared that November in The New Yorker. The story opens with a sprightly, ingenious gambit—-Jill Chidchester Madison's verbose and pretentious “item” for her college alumnae magazine, wherein she breezily reports that she remains married to her “unintellectual 190-pound halfback” while writing a critical biography of Flaubert and serving as president of “every civic organization in the community”: “I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks,” she concludes. What she does not find time for, needless to say, is being a decent wife and mother. Her kindly ex-halfback husband, Georgie, not only is forced to polish the silver (while wearing an apron), but also does most of the caring, in every sense, for their adorable four-year-old son, Bibber. After a long night of housework—and never mind his day job—Georgie finally goes to bed, hoping for some well-earned lovemaking, but Jill interrupts their embrace with a spontaneous recital of Flaubert en bon français. Bewildered and hurt by Georgie's angry response (“God damn it to hell!”), she thereafter devotes herself wholeheartedly to stopping the construction of a four-lane highway. One night Georgie comes home to find Bibber abandoned and burning with fever: Jill is in Albany, appearing before the highway commission, while the babysitter (leaving a note on the bloodstained pillow) has been called away. Bibber dies, and Georgie never forgives his wife. “I thought then how inferior he was to Jill, how immature,” remarks the laughably unreliable (and hitherto invisible) narrator, who wants never again to see the “cruel and unreasonable” Georgie. Here again is Cheever's guileful irony: such a narrator is disingenuous if you like, or sincerely deploring if you don't.

  Cheever might have suspected he'd gone too far this time—though perhaps not. Four years before, noting the constant presence of “predatory women” in his fiction, he'd conceded that this particular motif amounted to a “serious weakness in [his] vision; a crack.” But when readers asked Cheever, in person, why he seemed to dislike women so much, he'd look puzzled and protest that he loved women (“but”—as he wrote in his journal—”when I am kicked and spat on I must say so”). As for Bibber's death at the hands of a self-absorbed, civic-minded mother, Cheever once wrote the following in regard to Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread: “The death of a child seems to be idle and repulsive and I think that in fiction, much as in life, we may not, without good reason, slaughter the innocent, persecute the defenseless and infirm, or speak with idle malice.” That was in 1959. By 1963 he'd evidently changed his mind, or else felt there was “good reason” for disposing of Bibber. In any case, he was shocked when his wife confronted him in the pantry: “It was wicked of you to kill the child,” she said. “I do not reply,” he wrote afterward, “to say that I feel as if the last of my literary plumage had been plucked off my back; I do not suggest that we set up a censorship desk where my subject matter will be judged …” Later that night, Cheever was still “rigid” with indignation—and, by his own confession, very drunk—weeping over this latest affront to his autonomy while piously teaching the alphabet to his “little, little son.”*

  By then he'd already written “The Ocean” (though it wouldn't appear in print until the following summer), one of his most brilliant and bizarre stories, and perhaps his most cruelly deliberate caricature of Mary Cheever. The wife in the story, named Cora, is an eccentric and possibly mad woman who expresses malice with a “musical voice” pitched “in the octave above middle C.” The narrator—a gentle, well-meaning husband—has reason to think she is trying to murder him: she douses the salad with lighter fluid (“You left the lighter fluid in the pantry,” she explains, “and I mistook it for vinegar”), and seems to have sprayed pesticide on the veal cutlets. In spite of t
his, her husband feels nothing but tender concern when she stands madly watering the lawn in a rainstorm, and wonders how to coax her back inside before the neighbors see (“Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends”). The narrator also has a daughter named Flora, who has dropped out of college “to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak;” the couple occupy themselves by artily gluing butterflies to a skeleton purchased from a medical supply house. Finally the narrator rebels against “sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair,” and antically writes the word “luve” all over the house for Cora to see, then magically escapes to a serene English countryside where his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found: “I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.”

  “Maybe he was wicked,” Mary Cheever speculated after her husband's death, though in time she would achieve a remarkably lucid detachment. “No,” she said, when asked whether he'd based certain characters on her. “He used details about me and other women, but his characters came whole out of his own strong feelings. I'm not saying obsession.” She paused. “ ‘His own obsessions’ is correct, actually.” Fair enough. Thirty years before making this observation, however, she decided never to fight with the man again (if possible), since her words would only end up in his fiction.

  AFTER READING “THE OCEAN” in typescript, Maxwell called Cheever and told him he was at the top of his form and needed to work very hard. This he did. Before the summer was over, he wrote another story (“Montraldo”) and finished revising The Wapshot Scandal, after which he left for Yaddo and wondered what to do next. “You can kick around Narcissus,” he wrote in his journal, after a hungover day at the pool. Mythography was very much in vogue at the time, particularly applauded by academic critics such as Fiedler and Hassan; Updike's The Centaur had just been published to great acclaim, and Cheever himself had expressed an intention to “rewrite Bulfinch”—which he did to some extent in a series of recent vignettes titled “Metamorphoses,” baldly modernizing the myths of Orpheus and Actaeon and others. But Cheever's imagination was such that he hardly needed recourse to Bulfinch. He was forever going off on “tangents” (as Dodie Merwin had put it), compulsively transforming the world into something more resonant, funny, and meaningful. As for “kick[ing] around Narcissus,” he had in mind a fellow Yaddo guest whom he was meeting for the first time that September, composer Ned Rorem, who'd just broken his ankle and was hobbling about with a little plaster cast. As a reader of Freud, Cheever tended to equate homosexuality with narcissism, and in this respect the (almost) forty-year-old Rorem struck him as a kind of wistful, aging boy: “[H]e seems, in halflights, to represent the pure impetuousness of youth, the first flush of manhood,” Cheever wrote. “He intends to be compared to a summer's day, particularly its last hours and yet I think he is none of this.”

  Here was a tangent leading to Cheever's greatest story, and while he'd dispense with explicit parallels to Narcissus, he retained the idea of fading youth as well as the name Ned. But Rorem was not the only boyish middle-aged male on his mind—indeed, it was one of Cheever's own defining traits, as he often admitted (with amusement and rue) in his journal. Though he played the dignified squire in his elegant farmhouse, part of him had never changed from the freewheeling youth who refused to get a job or pin himself down in any way; at age fifty-one he still flung himself into icy pools with vigorous abandon, got drunk whenever he felt like it, and was always poised to fall in love or escape. As Maxwell put it with (perhaps) faintly exasperated affection after his friend's death, “He lived as a child would live if a child were able.” Remaining young is a “mode of hope,” as Cheever would say—everything lies ahead—and in this respect he was also thinking of his brother, Fred. “You can draw a line easily enough from the summery boy to the club drunk, but where did … the phony hopefulness come from?” Fred's hopefulness in the face of total disaster—for both himself and his family—struck his brother as an object lesson in the ruinous consequences of self-deceit, a fate he rightly feared for himself. “I clear my throat, reset my shoulders, put out my cigaret in the same abrupt or jerky way of my brother. I move in the same vigorous and decisive way … that arises from, in his case, incomprehensible despair.” Such were the ideas that began to transpire as he wrote “The Swimmer,” which he later explained as being “about the irreversibility of human conduct.”

  Once he knew that he was no longer evoking Narcissus, staring into a single pool, he gave Neddy the freedom to swim from one pool to the next (as he himself liked to do), encountering elements of his past along the way. Soon Cheever suspected he had “a perfectly good” novel on his hands—there were some thirty pools in all—but then something began to happen: “It was growing cold and quiet,” Cheever later recalled. “It was turning into winter. Involuntarily. It was a terrible experience, writing that story. I was very unhappy. Not only I the narrator, but I John Cheever, was crushed.” As he began to find the core of the story, he threw away pages and took yet a different approach. The main technical challenge, he realized, could not be sustained over the course of a novel: that is, Neddy could not plausibly repress the truth for some two hundred pages, and the magic involved in making the seasons change in a single afternoon was better accomplished with a few deft strokes, such that the reader scarcely notices until it is dark and cold and Ned, suddenly, is the embodiment of “an old man nearing the end of his journey.”

  “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night,’ “ the story famously begins. Neddy Merrill—who has “a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure”—is drinking gin at the Westerhazys’ (no less) when he's struck by the delightfully original idea of going home along the “quasi-subterranean stream” of pools from his friends’ house to his own. He names this the Lucinda River, after his long-suffering wife, who also “drank too much” and now disappears from the story with a flick of the author's wand (lest she say a word more and spoil the effect): “When Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.” For a while Ned's journey proceeds auspiciously: he walks beneath “flowering apple trees” to his first pool, the Grahams’, and then encounters a pleasant cocktail party at the Bunkers’, where he's ecstatically kissed by the hostess and “eight or ten other women” before being served by a “smiling bartender.” A faint minor-key trill is sounded around the halfway point, when Ned ducks into the Levys’ gazebo to wait out a cloudburst: “Then there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year before that?” Thus the first hint that Ned's mind is blurred—and since the story is, after all, from Ned's point of view, one might begin to wonder (if only half consciously) whether it's really a “midsummer” day at all*: “The rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn.” Ned, too, begins to shed leaves as he journeys from past to present, illusion to truth, his strength waning with every step. “We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy,” says an old friend, vaguely remarking on rumors that he'd sold his house and that something has happened to his “poor children.” Ned hastens away, but the Lucinda River becomes more treacherous, until the natives themselves—first welcoming, then at least sympathetic—rebel and turn nasty. At a parvenu's party he's scorned as a “gate crasher” and snubbed by the bartender (“to be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that [Ned] had suffered some loss of social esteem”), but the harshest wound is inflicted by an old mistress, who ridicules this latest “legendary” exploit with a casual insult compressing a novel's worth of exposition: “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?” And so the constellations of autumn—”Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia”—wheel into the sky, and what the weeping Ned will find at home i
s now a foregone conclusion: “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.”

  The end. The particulars of Ned's calamity—the fate of his “poor daughters,” his financial losses, his housing arrangements (do he and Lucinda live full-time at the Westerhazys’?)—are left to the reader's imagination, such that Ned's darkened house seems all the more haunted. One wants to go back to the beginning and search for clues, see how the trick works, or simply reimmerse oneself in the pleasures of such a perfect story. “‘The Swimmer’ is a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow,” said Michael Chabon, who made the nice point that the story has “mythic echoes … and yet is always only the story of one bewildered man, approaching the end of his life, journeying homeward, in a pair of bathing trunks, across the countryside where he lost everything that ever meant something to him.” Years later, when asked about the story's “mythic” content, Cheever laughed and replied that such matters were better left to those who “teach fiction … at the level of veterinary medicine”: “It's much easier for the teacher and easier for the student who has no particular interest in literature to dissect a story than to be moved by it.” By then he'd cheerfully abandoned any thought of “rewrit[ing] Bulfinch;” as “The Swimmer” proved once and for all, his own myths were good enough.