Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  TOWARD THE END of his Russian visit, Cheever still had a lot of rubles to spend, so one night on a train he bought Romanian champagne for all his fellow passengers. Afterward two men approached him and asked if he'd like to buy something really interesting—a genuine seventeenth-century icon (which hangs in Cheever's house to this day). Later, as he was secreting the sacred artifact in his suitcase along with his fur hats and football, Yevtushenko called at his hotel and said he had a present for Cheever. “No, no,” said the poet, when Cheever indicated his already bulging suitcase, “this is nothing you take with you. This is something special.” The two drove a while to a “sort of slum” outside Moscow, where Cheever was introduced to the artist Oleg Tselkov—in disgrace at the time—who produced a number of paintings for his inspection (“brilliant, progressive, and heretical,” Cheever observed). “So!” said Yevtushenko at last. “He cannot show his painting. He cannot sell his painting. He cannot discuss his painting. My present to you is the invincibility of his painting.”

  Cheever left Russia the next day. “When the train from Leningrad crossed the Finnish border we all cheered, sang, and got drunk,” he wrote. “It was like getting out of prison. I sat in the Amsterdam airport with a gin and tonic and thought with longing of vast, slothful Mother Russia but had I been asked to return I would have fought with my life.” Lonely and exhausted from the whole fraught adventure, Cheever still had one more stop to make in West Berlin, where he was supposed to give a reading at the Amerika Haus. Perhaps his greatest fan in the city was a forty-year-old writer named Paul Moor, who as a young man in Texas had been a devotee of The New Yorker and particularly John Cheever. Reading of the latter's arrival in the newspaper, Moor learned from the Amerika Haus that Cheever was staying at the Hilton, and promptly gave him a call. He (Moor) was a friend of the Styrons, he said, offering to put himself at Cheever's disposal for the duration of his stay. Cheever was delighted—all the more so when he discovered that Moor could quote long passages from his work, and seemed insatiably curious as to how that glorious work had come into being. “May I kiss you?” Cheever asked, with lingering Slavic brio, after a particularly enjoyable evening. Moor accepted the buss as innocent, since Cheever had lengthily discussed his passionate attachment to Hope Lange.

  That last night in Berlin, Cheever invited Moor up to his room for a nightcap. “I've had some very pleasant homosexual experiences,” he suavely declared, filling Moor's glass. Moor was “thunderstruck”: it was true that he himself was gay, and he'd assumed that Cheever had figured as much, but … what about Hope Lange? (“As for Paul [Moor],” Cheever wrote Litvinov, “I think he was or may be a homosexual. … This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too deep.”) At any rate, Moor responded to this unexpected sally with a guarded nod—”I adored him as a writer, but not physically”—and the evening passed without further incident.

  Moor kept in touch with a stream of letters, to which Cheever courteously replied, until Moor came to New York in June 1965 and the two met for lunch at the Algonquin. Saying goodbye on Forty-fourth Street (“He was on his way to The New Yorker office to do something catty about John Updike,” Moor recalled), Cheever suddenly gave the man a tight and definitively final embrace, after which the letters from Ossining dwindled to nothing. “I would like to live in a world in which there are no homosexuals,” he wrote of Moor, “but I suppose Paradise is thronged with them.”

  • • •

  FOR MONTHS after his return from Russia, Cheever spoke of little else. He'd refined the whole experience into a nice comic routine, commencing with his arrival on that rainy night in Moscow (cheep cheep cheep) and proceeding amid the Georgian sheep, the songs, the drinking, the mistaken statue of Pavlov, and culminating in a “fifteen minute impersonation of Yevtushenko.” He distributed fur hats among his friends, whose company he found more intolerable than ever. “There is no self-consciousness at all about the banality of the conversations,” he wrote of a Westchester dinner party. “One goes on calmly for hours about the difficulty of getting a plumber; the difficulties of getting a boy into college; the expense of fertilizing the lawn.” Cheever determined not to go to any more such parties if he could help it, because they did “severe damage to [his] spirits and [his] health.” Staying home, then, and drinking in his yellow wing chair, he ruminated over all the emotional things he'd say about the Russians at the State Department debriefing: “They gave me no trouble. They gave me friendship and at least the illusion of love.” What's more, he thought his rapport with all these affectionate people had changed quite a few minds about the United States, and surely all that was to the good. Indeed, this appears to be what he did say, more or less, and perhaps that's why the FBI made Cheever the subject of “internal security interest.” In 1967, the agency intercepted a note from Cheever to Ryurikov of Foreign Literature: “I am not a political person and I have no informed opinions on Socialist Culture,” he brashly asserted; “but I cannot let the occasion of your 50th anniversary pass without saying how vivid my memories of the greatness of your country and your people remain.” Cheever sensed that he'd excited some sort of unsavory official notice (“My name is mud”), but he didn't much care. For a long time he continued to receive gushing letters from his Russian friends, and his own letters were cherished and often read aloud in public by Litvinov or Frieda Lurie (Updike's minder), who wrote him a few weeks after his return: “We all miss and love you inspite of the broad ocean between us.”

  Cheever needed all the love he could get—though it seemed, at first, that absence had made his wife's heart grow fonder. She and Federico had met him at the airport, and the three had stayed up late while Cheever told stories and handed out presents; better yet, Mary had “bounded into bed” with him and “declared her undying love.” “All my anger is idle and a waste of power,” he decided, but not for long. “[I]n a blaze of gin and self importance I announce at the [dinner] table that I will not be harried by … an English instructor,” he wrote in December. All the old problems had briskly returned to the fore: Mary neglected him in favor of grading themes and whatnot, which in turn made him drink too much, and drink made him impotent, and impotence led to an all-purpose paranoia that his wife was less and less apt to pacify. If he wasn't satisfying his wife in bed, Cheever reasoned, then she must be satisfying herself elsewhere, and he applied this syllogism even to the most unlikely scenarios—the way (for instance) his old friend Spear behaved whenever he picked up Mary for choir practice: “A[rt] usually goes through the routine of being a young man taking a young woman away from an old coot. M[ary] usually swings her tail and giggles.” Cheever put up with this unseemly charade for as long as he could decently stand it, then put his foot down in no uncertain terms: “I rail, I swear. … I say that when A[rt] comes I will beat him up, I will disfigure him. She goes to the telephone to warn him. I break the connection. … I roar, oh Christ, decide not to drink anymore, think bitterly that they will make a great couple; the educational junkheap and the Audubon Society of [which] he is president.” Sober, of course, he felt the usual crushing remorse—toward Spear—and apologized. But as for his marriage, he figured it was a goner and considered getting a divorce:

  What other dignified course is left to me. I am treated like a wretch, fit to be cooked for a cuckolded, malodorous, supported by a suces fous [sic], comical, impotent, opinionated, uneducated, short-cocked and illbred. But waking at two and three I remember a love so pure and fresh, sighs and cries of pleasure … engorgements and revelations that I think it is this I should remember. To be practical I will always have M[ary]'s lengthy and mysterious depressions to cope with but I can hope that these will diminish.

  Meanwhile his brother was becoming a hardship again. In the summer of 1963, that unsinkable man had pulled himself together and gotten a job as advertising manager of Stores, the publication of the National Retail Merchants Association. By then, however, he had borrowed so much money from the bank
that his wages were confiscated to pay the debt, and soon he was drinking again and trying to sell subscriptions to Life over the telephone. This was so irrefutably hopeless that his wife, Iris—who'd been working as a clerk in a gift shop—decided to call it quits for good, and Fred began to go under for what appeared to be the last time. “I call Fred who makes no sense,” his brother wrote. “Uds the seet smell of sugsess, he says. … I can only try to imagine the excruciating pain he suffers. I expect he can kill himself or come close to it and I will call this morning to see if he should be taken to a hospital.”

  That was August 1964. In mid-November—two weeks after John returned from Russia—Fred appeared at Cedar Lane looking sober, relatively fit, and rather chastened. He was going to AA three times a week, he said, and attending the Unitarian church on Sunday. More than ever he was unabashedly worshipful of his celebrated little brother, as if their family connection was the last source of self-esteem he had left. (After their meeting, he related to his daughter Sarah, among other things, that Updike and her uncle John “can do the twist beautifully, and they drew admiring crowds. The Russians just aren't built to do it.”) When Fred remarked that he made ends meet with freelance work for the Famous Writers School, John replied that he'd been offered a chair at Harvard (“I'm not sure this is true,” he wrote in his journal, “and if it were it would have been a terrible mistake on the part of the University”). At length Fred came to the point: “He describes his bookshop, his dream; old fashioned lamps, hooked rugs a rolltop desk, really a gem, he says. Why do I find this so embarrassing. Do I come from a family of born shopkeepers, people who dream of shelves, inventories, firesales.” As if to reproach himself for unkind thoughts, John agreed to loan Fred five thousand dollars for the bookshop, and shortly thereafter they drew up papers at a lawyer's office, where Fred told jokes in a Jewish accent.

  Within less than a year, his dream—the “eagle i” (lower case) bookstore in Westport—had come to an end, and he was “trying to establish a sales pattern” for a small FM radio station. As he explained to his children, he'd “put his whole heart and soul” into making a go of the “eagle i,” but had to close the place when Uncle John refused to loan him any money. “F[red] telephones,” John noted, roughly a month after the “eagle i” had expired. “Are you all right, he asks, are you sure you're all right? What he wants is six hundred dollars, bringing my loans for less than a year to eight thousand. When he was drunk he always used to ask: Are you all right, are you sure you're all right.”

  * A 1980 edition of Cheever's Selected Stories (Moscow: Progress Publishers) includes ten canonical stories along with three specimens of juvenilia chosen for their congenial themes: “I'm Going to Asia,” about a frivolous bourgeois family who willfully ignore the tides of history which threaten to engulf them; “The Pleasures of Solitude,” about a selfish old woman who savagely beats an urchin with her umbrella; and “Frère Jacques,” about an engagé man who reads about the Spanish Loyalists while his vapid mistress sings to her laundry bundle.

  † He was replaced in 1939 by Molotov, who went on to negotiate the “nonaggression” pact with the Nazis. Maxim Litvinov, known for his friendly overtures to the West, served as ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1943.

  * When the ordeal was over, Cheever visited the suburban home of F. Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie Lanahan, where he was received by her then husband, Jack: “There seems to be cheese spread on his mouth and he has been drinking. He treats me, first, as if I were trying to sell encyclopedias but presently we settle down to drink.” Eventually Mrs. Lanahan arrived and began to complain about the recent publication of Hemingway's posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, wherein the size of her father's penis (among other things) had been impugned.

  * After his visit to Russia, Cheever often sent copies of The New Yorker to Litvinov, who shared them with her friend Chukovsky. Said the latter, “I'm getting conditioned to the ads, and quite enjoy looking at the girls I'll never kiss, the cars I'll never drive, the sweaters I'll never wear, the shoes which will never pinch my toes, the places I'll never visit …” The list went on, and ended with “the cemetery I'll never recline in.” He died in 1969.

  * This is true. Though Cheever corresponded with hundreds of people over the course of his life, the only surviving letters I found among his papers—kept in an old sewing box in his library—were a few letters from his children, various odds and ends, and perhaps fifty letters from Litvinov.

  * Cheever told Litvinov that his wife had declined to accompany him because of anti-Semitism in Russia—though of course it may have been for any number of reasons. Whatever the case, he felt very bitter about it: “Wasn't it sleazy of her not to come?” he said. Litvinov had never encountered the word “sleazy” before.

  † When I asked the former Mary Updike (now Weatherall) about her alleged remarks, she was mystified and absolutely denied saying anything of the sort, even in jest: “John [Updike] loved Cheever's writing,” she said. “We both read everything he wrote.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  {1964-1965}

  CHEEVER AFFECTED TO BE INDIFFERENT to reviews, and liked to say that he made a point of leaving the country so he wouldn't have to bother with them: he'd been in Italy when The Wapshot Chronicle was published, and went again when the sequel came out seven years later. The truth was, of course, that Cheever scrutinized almost every word of every review from the Times to the Salt Lake Tribune, though he did keep up appearances by kiting off to Russia when his fifth collection, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, was published that October. “Where the hell are the reviews?” he complained in Leningrad, as he had rather high hopes for the book, which included some of his best work (“The Swimmer,” “The Ocean,” and the title story).

  The reviews were mostly positive, as usual, though some of them sounded a vaguely troubled note about the direction of Cheever's work. An anonymous reviewer for Newsweek remarked that his sensibility was becoming “so weird that it veers perilously close to Charles Addams,” and the Washington Post worried about Cheever's increasing “pessimism,” while conceding “the gloomy brilliance of his prophecy.” Orville Prescott, in the daily Times, called Cheever “one of the most gifted, original and interesting of contemporary American writers of fiction,” and considered all sixteen stories worthwhile—however: “Four seem to me less successful than the rest and these are all rather sinister fantasies.” Prescott—a champion of virile realists à la Cozzens and Marquand (“our American Galsworthy”)—was referring, of course, to such stories as “The Swimmer” and “The Ocean.” One of the most presumptuous and damning assessments of Cheever's work as a whole was John Aldridge's long review in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. Cheever, he declared, “is one of the most grievously underdiscussed important writers we have at the present time”—a claim that might have made Cheever smile, though the smile was liable to die horribly as he read on. Aldridge thought that Cheever's Time cover and National Book Award had actually precluded serious critical attention, for these honors were regarded (in serious circles) as “a kind of good housekeeping seal of middlebrow literary approval”: “It was no accident that Time should have offered Cheever to the world as a kind of crew-cut Ivy-League Faulkner of the New York exurbs.” Cheever's vacuous characters took refuge in “small, arbitrary” rebellions, or in pathetic, misguided nostalgia, or in daydreams “not of Walter Mittyish grandiosity, but of almost girlish modesty and poignance.” The Walter Mitty reference was wont to remind Cheever of the time Irving Howe described him as a “toothless Thurber” in Partisan Review* and never mind the “girlish” crack. As for the weirdness of Cheever's sensibility, Aldridge—like that Newsweek reviewer—also invoked Charles Addams: “Somehow the nightmare tonalities of his work come to seem after a while a little too coy and cloying, the postures of psychic torment a little too much like the smartly macabre decor of some Fifth Avenue shop window in which creepy mannequins stand around draped in the latest creation by
Charles Addams.” Evidently, though, Aldridge had not despaired of Cheever, as he closed by echoing Gertrude Stein's hectoring but hopeful advice to the young Hemingway: “Begin over again and concentrate. For he [Cheever] does not yet disturb us enough.”

  Cheever dismissed Aldridge as little better than a vandal, while privately agreeing with him somewhat. “I seem neither sane enough nor mad enough,” he wrote in his journal shortly after the review appeared. He'd been looking over some old work and had found even the best of his stories “circumspect” and “small.” The resolution of one, for example, “The Cure”—about a man who begins to go mad when his wife leaves him, until she returns and he feels fine again—was “superficial,” a characteristic problem, though Cheever felt reluctant to go “any deeper into that storm.”* For his new novel, however, he wanted to be disturbing in earnest—a task, he wrote Litvinov, that he approached “warily”: “[I]t is like letting oneself into a labyrinth.” A year before, he'd written what was perhaps the first incubatory note for a story that would become Bullet Park: “a man who looks in the windows of buildings all over the world trying to find an interior a yellow room where he will be happy.” As Cheever continued to ponder this man (apparently mad to some degree), it occurred to him that such a character might serve to “introduce violence, in order to dramatize a moral dilemma, into a landscape, a way of life that might be characterized by its monotonous lack of violence.” Even then, vaguely, Cheever liked the idea of an attempted “crucifixion” in the suburbs (let Aldridge call that “coy and cloying”): “I would like to write a gothic novel,” he wrote, “without being caught in the act.”