Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  He began to have misgivings as soon as he submitted the story, and for the right reasons: namely, he realized that it had been “motivated by unreasonable hatefulness” and its garish surrealism was such that he might be “declared mad.” He wasn't far wrong. In recent years, Cheever's fondness for the “implausible” had caused increasing dismay at The New Yorker, and this time they “threw in the sponge,” as Maxwell put it: “[Cheever] was the first person I ever saw try to do this and I just stood there with my mouth open. He tried things that people felt weren't possible in fiction. It turned out that anything was possible in fiction.” By the time Barthelme and Barth and Coover and other post-realists had become (briefly) dominant figures on the scene, Maxwell realized that he'd underestimated stories such as “Justina” and “The Swimmer”—the latter of which was not only stuck “behind the cartoons,” as Cheever would have it, but behind an Updike story too. (“This seems to me unintelligent and perhaps mean, but then one encounters much of both.”) Then and later, however, Maxwell viewed “The Geometry of Love” as positive proof that Cheever was “losing his powers” because of alcohol. Indeed, the man was so troubled that he took it upon himself to stop in Ossining and reject the story in person. “I was drinking gin and romping with the dogs,” Cheever wrote a friend. “[Bill] looked at me sadly, patted me gently, said that the story was a ghastly failure and implied that I had lost my marbles.” Legend has it that Cheever became furious, but that would appear to be an exaggeration*: “I could not, with a skinful and surrounded by so many loving animals, take him seriously and I reminded him, cruelly, of all the other stories they had rejected and of all the editorial crap I've put up with over the years.” Afterward, though, Cheever wondered whether he'd been “needlessly harsh”—if not actually “furious”—while suspecting, too, that Maxwell was right. Nevertheless, he decided to give the story to Candida Donadio, who promptly sold it to The Saturday Evening Post for three thousand dollars. “This cheered me.”

  For nearly two decades, Maxwell's rejections had often been emotional and financial calamities for Cheever, but never again—and so he felt “cheered,” and cheerfully he indulged in a kind of impudence that had been hitherto absent in their friendship: “I look forward to having the book,” he wrote of Maxwell's 1966 collection, The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales, “and I am determined to write you a letter to explain that while I liked some of the pieces and was unenthusiastic about some this plainly has nothing to do with their merit.” This mocked, lightly, one of Maxwell's typical gambits, in which the editor professed, with delicate modesty, that a given work of Cheever's was (but only in his opinion) a failure. As for their less and less frequent personal meetings, Cheever tried to be sociable—he liked to make things go—but usually found it heavy sledding: Maxwell seemed more solemn than ever, and sometimes even pointedly unfriendly; if Cheever didn't labor to carry the conversation, a “massive silence” had a way of descending. “He said that he loves me,” Cheever wrote, shortly after the “Geometry” rejection, “and I have often said that he mistook power for love and the fact that he is now powerless may explain the chill.” In years to come, however, there would be many times when he missed Maxwell's insight, discretion, and generosity—and yes, even his old “power,” since it gave a diffident man the license to speak frankly, and after all (Cheever conceded) there wasn't “anyone better” as a critic.

  “What disturbs me,” Maxwell said after Cheever's death, “is not that we stopped talking but that we kept on talking and never said what we thought. I never spoke out.” Apart from aesthetic differences, Cheever's fame after the Time cover had made him a different and rather distasteful man—at least to Maxwell, to whom he couldn't resist holding forth about his flirtation with Hope Lange and so forth. “B[ill] calls to say that Eddie [Newhouse] had a heart attack in a taxi cab,” Cheever noted in August 1967.

  He has just returned from visiting him in the hospital. … I think I will not go to see him because I do not like to admit that such a thing could happen to a friend and perhaps to me. I tell B[ill] that I have just returned from a week in Naples with Sophia Loren. I am not quite sure of his reaction. It could be anger. I remember his saying that my life was charmed and I remember his writing with anger and bitterness about people who consider their lives to be charmed. What fools they are!

  It could be anger. Perhaps, but to some extent Maxwell blamed himself: “I didn't say, ‘For Christ's sake, John, will you stop talking about actors?’—or anything that would have been decent to have said.”

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1965, Cheever was invited back to Chicago, with Ellison and Norman Mailer, to address the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association; the putative topic was “the relationship of the novelist to the country's power structures.” Cheever, however, saw it as an opportunity to air (entertainingly, he hoped) certain qualms he had about Mailer and others. He'd been “pleased and excited” by The Naked and the Dead, whose ambition had left him feeling dejected over “[his] own confined talents;” but Mailer's most recent novel, An American Dream—about Stephen Rojack's lurid quest for sensation in the face of a deadening society—struck Cheever as “repetitious and fetid”: “In describing intercourse in detail [Mailer] is limited by the fact that only three orifices are involved and so is forced into repeating himself.” If American writers (as Mailer, Roth, and others suggested) were obliged to keep pace with the outrageous unreality of current events—Vietnam, race riots, rampant pornography—then it wouldn't be long, thought Cheever, before the more delicate, abiding pleasures of literature became obsolete.

  Cheever had chatted with Mailer at an Academy gathering in 1960, and though the exchange was friendly enough, Cheever thought he detected a fellow “sexual impostor” in Mailer's “great affectation of bellicosity”: “I think I see a man, a touching one, in the throes of confused sexual longings, and forced into a painful pose, a painful imposture.” Affected or not, such a bellicose man would not be ridiculed with impunity, and before the MLA meeting Cheever wrote friends that he'd “trimmed [his] weight to 138 lbs.” in order to “tangle with Mailer.” When the day arrived, however, he began to have second thoughts (“Will I be able to deliver my speech? Will gin help?”), and was so late for a pre-speech luncheon that his host, Robert Lucid, phoned Mary Cheever in Ossining: “Well, you've got to find him!” she said, alarmed at the possibilities. Fortunately Cheever arrived a few minutes later, dressed for battle in a tailored suit and immaculate pearl-gray Brooks Brothers hat, which (said Lucid) “he kept glancing at during lunch to be sure it hadn't disappeared.”

  The session was the most crowded in recent memory: some two thousand scholars packed a room at the Palmer House, while others listened outside on the PA system. Ellison got things started with a pompous, leaden address that “seemed to puzzle the audience,” as Richard Stern wrote in The New York Review of Books, but Cheever's speech—”The Parable of the Diligent Novelist”—left everybody (but Mailer) “ablaze with pleasure.” Cheever told of a man who quits the seminary to become a writer, until one day (“when he was busily trying to describe the sound of a winter rain”) he glances at the Times and realizes that, given the violence of his age, such an occupation is “contemptible;” thus he becomes a war correspondent in Saigon. When this begins to pall, he returns to New York and writes a pornographic novel titled Manhattan Beach Boy, but it doesn't seem convincing enough: “He saw that the sexual candor of men like Miller, Updike, Mailer and Roth was not a question of their raw material but of their mastery of the subject.” Therefore he embarks on a spree of buggery and exhibitionism, and in the course of “confronting those barriers of consciousness that should challenge a writer” he also turns to alcohol and drugs: “His writing, while he is drugged, seems to him stupendous but when he reads it over during his few sober moments he realizes it is worthless.” Ultimately, he becomes a spy and is run over by a taxi in Moscow: “Writing a novel,” he gasps, dying, “becomes more difficult each day.”
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  Mailer was “pissed”: “In those days I took myself very seriously,” he recalled, “and was indeed embattled.” He regarded Cheever as a lightweight—”darling of The New Yorker, Time cover boy, that sort of thing”—a lapdog of the establishment, in short, which was constantly sniping at Mailer back then. Clutching the microphone and glaring at Cheever (who gazed benignantly back), Mailer delivered “a corrosive, brilliant, hit-and-run analysis of the failure of American novelists to keep up with a whirling country,” as Stern described it. “There has been a war at the center of American letters for a long time,” Mailer declared. This began as a “class war” between realists like Dreiser who attempted to produce novels “which would ignite a nation's consciousness of itself,” and genteel entertainers who appealed to “an uppermiddleclass [looking] for a development of its taste. … That demand is still being made by a magazine called The New Yorker.“ In the end, said Mailer, both impulses had “failed,” and literature was now being superseded by movies and television.

  That, anyway, was the gist of it, and when it was over the academics “thundered applause” (Stern). “I am impressed by Mailer's delivery,” Cheever wrote, “but in retrospect most of what he has to say doesn't parse.” Mailer glared at him a bit more, but finally they made amends and retired en masse to the Playboy Mansion, where they sat chatting in the Grotto Bar while swimmers fluttered past a glass wall; occasionally, said Cheever, “young women wearing nothing but artificial eyelashes” would wander into the bar “doing cross-word puzzles,” then glance at the middle-aged literati sitting there, and withdraw.

  After Cheever's death, Mailer finally got around to reading his work and felt “a great sense of woe”: “Why didn't I know that man?” At the time Cheever sensed Mailer didn't like him much, but decided to like Mailer all the same—especially when Mary attacked Mailer “as the sort of common brute whose only use for women is to get them on their backs”: “It is the old plaint of the feminist and I think with terror that my love is turning into one of those tweedy women with strained faces who teach freshman English at fourth-rate colleges,” Cheever reflected, but was soon cheered by a visit from his fun-loving neighbor Sara. “Mrs. Zagreb shows up on her way to a party, decked with sparklers and a ruby as big as a fig. She is, I announce, the sort of a woman who doesn't consider lying down for a man to be a chore. I give her a drink and flirt.”

  *”At the [Academy] ceremony on Wednesday,” Cheever wrote Maxwell in i960, “Irving Howe, who once described me as a Toothless Thurber with a graying prose style, appeared to have very little hair, all of it grey and seemed … to have no teeth at all.”

  * This entry is misdated as “1963” on page 191 of the published Journals, no doubt because the pages are jumbled in the original journal manuscript. Internal evidence suggests it was written around January 1965.

  * This he did. “He slept upstairs in a tiny room, like a boarder,” Sara Spencer (a.k.a. Mrs. Zagreb) deploringly recalled.

  * Maxwell's friend Shirley Hazzard said of the incident, “At its time [it was] quite a famous story of Cheever being uncontrollably angry” and Maxwell's Times obituary also gives a version of the story (attributed to Brendan Gill), characterizing Cheever as “furious” and Maxwell as “courtly.” But one may recall that Maxwell himself said “the only time” Cheever ever really showed anger toward him was during the “Brigadier” episode in 1961, and Cheever's journal bears this out: “Spears come and suddenly Bill whom I have not seen for months. He does not like my Euclid story and I am not disturbed [my italics] as I think I am meant to be. I am a little drunk. I remind him of the stories he has turned down, the editorial foolishness that I have tolerated, etc.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  {1966}

  THE EXCITEMENT OF CHICAGO faded, winter deepened, and Cheever went back to being depressed. He felt like a “prisoner” in his own unhappy home, and longed to escape more often, but his cafard was such that the local train had become “a kind of gethsemane.” Somewhat confined, then, to the pleasures of Ossining, he lunched with Art Spear and the like, until Spear dubbed their weekly gatherings the Friday Club. The other members were also gentlemen who didn't keep regular hours. Spear was “Founder,” Cheever was “Membership,” the folksinger Tom Glazer was “Treasurer” (good at figuring tips), and the witty alcoholic Alwyn Lee was “Entertainment;” later, when Lee moved to Italy (and presently died), he was replaced by John Dirks, a cartoonist and sculptor. Various others came and went over the years. “What all the Friday Club gang had in common,” said Federico, “was the belief that they were artists exiled to Ossining. Spear was the only exception: he was solid in ways the rest of them were not.” Cheever wasn't even the most famous of the group, arguably, as Glazer had become something of a national phenomenon with his 1963 novelty hit, “On Top of Spaghetti,” sung (with a chorus of endearing children) to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky.” As for John Dirks, he was the son of Rudolph, creator of The Katzenjammer Kids, which later became The Captain and the Kids and was taken over—grudgingly—by John, who was foremost a sculptor of metal fountains. Around noon, the group met for drinks at one of their houses, where wives were allowed to serve hors d'oeuvres as long as they vanished afterward. The men ate at various restaurants in the area, though perhaps their favorite was a raffish Italian place called Gino's (“The Oldest Seafood House in Croton”), where a bantering waitress named Pam became the “Ladies Auxiliary.” In a Times piece about the Friday Club published a few days after Cheever's death, Mary Dirks was quoted as saying that the men were “electrifying conversationalists, full of jokes and wild laughter.” Cheever would not have agreed. He liked to hear Alwyn Lee hold forth, but if others assayed witticisms or would-be aperçus, Cheever was liable to snort or mumble some rejoinder which, if audible, tended to sting. As he wrote about Glazer in his journal (which served as a veritable ledger of esprit de l'escalier insults vis-à-vis the Friday Club), “I am the one who tells the jokes. He is meant to listen.” Indeed, it was Glazer who rankled the most. In his freewheeling, folksinging youth, he'd drifted (like Cheever) from one flophouse to the next, and Cheever thought he remained redolent of such dwellings. That Glazer seemed to fancy himself an intellectual was perhaps the most galling part, especially after his “On Top of Spaghetti” success; Glazer himself was inclined to belittle the tune, and liked to focus instead on his more serious efforts in the tradition of Leadbelly and Burl Ives, as well as his work as an archivist (“but we all know,” Cheever noted, “that his principle [sic] source of income is singing commercials”).

  John Dirks also came in for a certain amount of subtle abuse. With Lee's departure, Cheever insisted on referring to his replacement as the new “Entertainment,” even though Dirks rarely said a word, funny or otherwise. “[H]is comic strip and his fountains bore me,” wrote Cheever, who thought Dirks's “provincialism” was matched only by that of his spouse. Mary Dirks was a Radcliffe alumna who taught English and theater at Briarcliff, which she satirized in a novel titled (in homage, perhaps, to her friend Cheever) The Bagleigh Chronicle. As a playwright and an actress, she also participated in a number of productions given by the Beechwood Players, a community-theater group based in Scarborough.* Cheever regarded her as the sort of shrill, pitiful dilettante who assuages her frustration, in part, by “french kiss[ing] in pantries,” though at other times he found her “pleasant and intelligent” and properly rebuked himself for making such “unkind and unnecessary” remarks, if only in his journal.

  In those days he mostly kept his malice in camera, or limited to the odd elliptical mumble, largely in deference to his old friend Spear: Cheever would have liked to emulate the man's decency, his enviable solidity, or in any case to be somewhat worthy of it. After lunch the two would take their dogs for a walk to the dam, then pass the afternoon playing backgammon, while Spear canvassed his friend's opinion about whatever old family document he was studying at the moment. Cheever always obliged in whatever way he could: “John called earl
y this AM to say come over at 11 and talk about the 19th century letters which I had asked him to look at,” Spear wrote Litvinov. “He, as you would know he would, read through the whole dull manuscript and indicated one third to discard.” (“Art talks about editing his greatgrandfather's journal; has talked about this for ten years. I say yes and no, concealing my impatience with politeness and wondering does he do the same for me.”) Anyway it was something to talk about, other than dogs and neighbors and church. And certainly Cheever appreciated such a “fine friendship … without a trace of jeopardy,” though it would never occur to him to mention anything truly personal, much less tormenting, which at best would have only puzzled the wholesome Spear. “[John] is in good shape,” the man cheerfully reported as late as 1974, when Cheever was entering the last stages of suicidal alcoholism.

  No matter what his condition, though, Cheever generally managed the drive to Yaddo every September for the board meeting, and during his visit in 1962 he'd met a twenty-nine-year-old poet named Raphael Rudnik to whom he took a shine (“I think that he will introduce me to a younger generation”). Rudnik, for his part, never forgot his first encounter with Cheever: “I was dozing in a chair by the pool, and saw this little man walk up. I heard him reading a book—an extraordinary book. But when I opened my eyes there was no book, he was just talking!” That night or the next, Rudnik gave a reading of his poetry and received a cherished compliment from Cheever, who said he felt that “everything was all right with the language” after hearing Rudnik's work—and what's more, he meant it. Cheever was then having a bad time with The Wapshot Scandal, and wrote in his journal that Rudnik's poetry had reminded him of “how [he] would like to write.” The friendship was sealed when Cheever discovered the young man had a “good wing” to boot, and so invited him to Cedar Lane for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner that year—and almost every year thereafter. “That house was the great good place for me,” said Rudnik. “John was a delightful person. I would see darker things, but [they] didn't denigrate the fact that this was a joyous occasion for everyone.”