Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Federico, not quite nine at the time, was largely exempt from his father's occasional cruelty—though on the surface, at least, he was an ideal candidate. Chubby, clumsy, glum, and unpopular, he was a veritable catalogue of flaws crying out for his father's correction. “I am teaching Fred how to pass and catch a football,” Cheever solemnly announced when the time came, though it wasn't long before he had to admit it was hopeless. Federico made his older brother look like a prodigy: Ben could catch the odd ball if one really persevered, but Federico never did—he defied the law of averages. Next Cheever tried bowling: “F[ederico] has no grace, no aptitude and I display the impatience of a father. There's no point in my paying good money to watch you roll the ball down the gutter. … Later he cries. ‘All I have is a good memory,’ he says. ‘I'm fat, people make fun of me.’ The force of this remark.” Federico, in short, was poignantly inept, and perhaps he reminded Cheever of himself at that age: much the youngest, that is, and generally regarded as a lost cause. Whatever the reason, his love for the boy was “massive.” After Cheever's death, Ben was approached at a party by Harold Brodkey, who consolingly told him how much his father had loved his children. “Oh no,” said Mary Cheever, overhearing the exchange. “The only one of the children he ever really cared about was Fred!”

  THE SCREENWRITER ELEANOR PERRY had read “The Swimmer” when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and immediately decided it would make a wonderful movie. She and her husband, Frank, a director, had made a critical splash with their first effort, David and Lisa (1962), but Eleanor's script for “The Swimmer” floated around the studios for almost a year before it was finally picked up by Sam Spiegel at Columbia. In the spring of 1966, Cheever was notified that shooting would begin that summer in Westport, Connecticut (less traffic noise than Westchester), and his first response was to make plans for leaving the country. On the other hand, Burt Lancaster had agreed to play Neddy, and the prospect of meeting the famous actor and any number of other glamorous Hollywood types (and perhaps telling Maxwell about it afterward) proved an aching temptation, and in the end Cheever became a frequent visitor to the set. At first, though, he was daunted, and asked Spear to come along for moral support; he also stopped in Greenwich and bought a pint of whiskey. “This helps to settle my nerves but my drinking seems erratic,” he wrote in his journal. “After several martinis, some wine and 1 Milltown [sic] I somewhat settle down.” Thus sedated, he did in fact enjoy meeting the fifty-two-year-old Lancaster, who struck him as “both young and old, masterful and tearful,” as well as remarkably committed to the role. Though an acrobat, a boxer, and a horseman, Lancaster could scarcely swim a stroke, and had been working since April with the UCLA swimming coach, Bob Horne. After shooting was finished that morning, the actor put on a bathrobe and had a poolside lunch with Cheever and the Perrys, after which Cheever (evidently over the worst of his shyness) “jump[ed] beararse” into the water.

  Perhaps the main reason he commuted so faithfully to Westport was a teenage actress named Janet Landgard, who played a sexy ex-babysitter. (One of the main padding devices in the movie is a long, lyrical interlude in which Lancaster cavorts around the countryside with Landgard and therefore feels, at least for a while, young and vigorous again.) “She was a nothing actress and not very pretty,” Mary Cheever observed of the young woman—whose career had begun with The Donna Reed Show and pretty much ended with The Swimmer—but Cheever thought she was marvelous, and was thrilled when the Perrys asked him to do a “talismanic” cameo opposite her and Lancaster. The scene was a poolside cocktail party, and the prop man had been filling Cheever's glass with Scotch for almost four hours before he finally got his call. As he wrote Weaver, “What I was supposed to do was to shake hands with Lancaster and say ‘You've got a great tan there Neddy.’ Things like that. I was supposed to improvise. …

  So we rehearsed about a dozen times and then we got ready for the first take but when this dish [Landgard] came on instead of shaking hands with her I gave her a big buss. So then when the take was over Lancaster began to shout: “That son of a bitch is padding his part” and I said I was supposed to improvise and Frank [Perry] said it was all right. I asked the girl if she minded being kissed and she said no, she said I had more spark than anybody else on the set. … Lancaster heard her. Anyhow on the second take I bussed her but when I reached out to shake Lancaster's hand the bastard was standing with his hands behind his back. So after the take I said that he was supposed to shake hands with me and he said he was just improvising. So on the third take I kissed her but when I made a grab for Lancaster all I got was a good look at his surgical incision in the neighborhood of his kidneys. We made about six takes in all but our friendship is definitely on the rocks.*

  Shortly after shooting ended in August, the whole project got “into very deep and stormy water,” as Cheever put it. Spiegel saw the rough cut and was flummoxed: What the hell was the man's motivation for swimming across the county? It made no sense! When the Perrys defended the arty ambiguity at the heart of Cheever's vision, Spiegel gave them the sack and hired a young Sydney Pollack to shoot a few “mop-up” scenes on the Coast. These included a long, tempestuous confrontation between Neddy and his mistress (played by Janice Rule), and a “Teamster's Union hose-type rainstorm” at the end; Spiegel also hired Marvin Hamlisch to compose the score, which one reviewer said “would sound overly passionate in a Verdi opera.” Among these complications, Cheever was principally worried about his paycheck: he'd gotten a measly ten thousand dollars up front, and would not receive the fifty-thousand-dollar balance “until 120 days after they made a final print.”

  Almost two years after the initial shooting in Westport, The Swimmer was somewhat grudgingly released in May 1968. Cheever was furious when Mary refused to attend the New York premiere, and considered taking Mrs. Zagreb instead (“in her limegreen Thunder-bird”), but finally went with Spear and sat between the Perrys, who got screen credit after all. “It is not a great picture but it is faithful to the story and at the end when he returns to the empty house grown men weep,” Cheever wrote Litvinov the next day; as for Lancaster, Cheever thought he was “great in the part—lithe and haggard—and the sense of an odyssey a life a man moving through space, time and water is there.” The critics, however, were almost categorically vicious. Perhaps the kindest was Vincent Canby in the Times, who professed to like the movie despite its being “uneven, patchy,” and “occasionally gross and mawkish.” More representative was Joseph Morgenstern's pan in Newsweek, which derided the movie as a ludicrous melodrama with a visual style akin to that of “a shampoo commercial.”* “I don't think the picture would ever have been great but Sam Spiegel really fucked it up,” Cheever remarked, a few months after his first, rather glowing critique. “He fired Frank and got a man named Pollock [sic] to put in the fancy dissolves … and reshoot the last ten minutes in Beverly Hills. Frank and I wanted Miles Davis for the music but instead we got a sixty-five all-girl string orchestra. Etc.”

  * Model for the “Laurel Players” in Yates's Revolutionary Road—the company whose catastrophically awful production of The Petrified Forest leads to April Wheeler's decline and eventual suicide.

  * He was easily reached by telephone, as his number was always listed—and is, for that matter, listed as of this writing, twenty-five years after his death.

  * In the published Letters, Ben Cheever explained that the false tooth was actually lost in a swimming pool: “There was in any case no significant alteration in the tone or volume of my father's farts.”

  * Though Cheever's blink-and-you-miss-it cameo is hard to follow, he appears to say to Landgard, “I'm John Estabrook,” then busses her, whereupon Lancaster takes her briskly away from him (without shaking hands), asking “How ya doin’ Kevin?” “Great, great,” Cheever drawls as the camera moves on.

  * On November 25, 2001, Steve Garbarino published a piece in the New York Times Magazine (“Leave It to Cheever”) in which he made a case for rediscovering the movie as
a perfect fable for the post-9/11 zeitgeist: “[I]n many ways, [Neddy] is a symbol of America now, a once presumably safe haven that has been forced to tighten its belt, put up its guard, find new footing and stay afloat while lamenting its lost innocence in a time of terrorism. Like Neddy, America can no longer rely on its charm. … And like our country, we find ourselves rooting for ‘The Swimmer’ down to the last drop.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  {1966-1967}

  CHEEVER THOUGHT Bullet Park would be an improvement over The Wapshot Scandal, though it wasn't any easier to write and was badly stalled by the summer of 1966 (“Just the sight of a typewriter gives me an acute pain in the gut”). He decided to put the novel aside and work on a couple of stories he'd been considering for the past year or so: one concerned an old expatriate poet who becomes consumed with obscenity, the other was a malicious portrait of Antonio Barolini, who'd been getting on Cheever's nerves lately (“Perhaps I can write a story about him”). The bumptious aristocrat had solicited a blurb from Cheever for his first novel, A Long Madness, translated from the Italian and published by Pantheon in 1964. “Una lunga pazzia,” Cheever would say, giving the Italian title, then add, “Un lungo romanzo [A long novel]!” Cheever hated writing blurbs in any case (“The mortal boredom of reading the fourth-rate novels of my drinking companions”), but was all the more piqued when Barolini's effort sold fewer than four hundred copies, despite his endorsement. Also, the man's constant whinging about his wife struck even Cheever as unseemly, though of course he found the woman insufferable, too. One day she phoned him to say she'd gotten “stuck” writing her novel, and wondered if he had any advice: “Oh for heaven's sake, Helen, take a walk around the block!” he snapped, banging the receiver down. So, yes, he had to concede that Barolini's wife was “truly difficult,” and he also sympathized with the way the poor man had to suffer the oafish condescension of their neighbors: “Like most Italians in this country he is taken immediately for a semi-comic member of the lower class; a gardener, fruit peddler a clown. They call him Tony, this nephew of a countess.” Such were the basic ingredients for an untitled story Cheever presently wrote, in which the main character is a feckless aristocrat named Marcantonio (“Boobee”) Parlapiano: “[Boobee] did not understand that men in America do not complain about their wives,” the narrator observes. By way of faint disguise, Cheever gave the fictional wife an operatic rather than literary ambition, but Helen Barolini recognized her husband at once and found the story “very objectionable.”

  “[I] have written two stories just to keep my hand in,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “One of them is quite dirty and the other is quite boring and I think I won't publish either of them.” As it happened, though, Cheever needed the money—he hadn't accepted an advance yet for Bullet Park—so he mailed both stories to The New Yorker (one still untitled), “because I like to put things in the mail,” as he said in the cover letter. The magazine accepted the “boring” story, and thus Cheever gave it the most perfunctory possible title, “Another Story”*; as for the “quite dirty”—and far superior—story, “The World of Apples,” it was predictably rejected and sold instead to Esquire. “Apples” had been somewhat inspired by the “unsavory dreams and reveries” which had beset Cheever for much of his life, but especially now that he was sleeping alone. Asa Bascomb, the poet in the story, is a disaffected New Englander who lives in the Anticoli-like town of Mount Carbone; one day he happens on a couple copulating in the woods, and afterward finds himself incapable of writing anything but pornography: filthy ballads (“The Fart That Saved Athens”), limericks, or simply the word “fuck” over and over. This, for Bascomb, is a profound sickness of the soul. Like his creator, he tends to associate obscenity with self-destruction—a matter of peculiar urgency, since four other poets “with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped” have all committed suicide (“but Bascomb in his stubborn, countrified way was determined to break or ignore this link—to overthrow Marsyas and Orpheus”). At one point the old man is vaguely tempted by the charms of a repulsive male prostitute, who seems “angelic, armed with a flaming sword that might conquer banality and smash the glass of custom”—but rather than succumb to such ultimate corruption, he makes a pilgrimage to the sacred angel of Monte Giordano, to whom he prays: “God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.” Having invoked his literary idols—men whose imaginative labors had left them painfully alienated and in some cases suicidal—Bascomb completes his purification by standing beneath an icy waterfall, as his father had done before him, and then returns home to write “a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that … would grace the last months of his life.”

  “Another Story” would appear in the February 25, 1967, issue of The New Yorker—more than two and a half years after Cheever's previous appearance in the magazine. One reason for the long absence was that he was simply writing fewer stories, though one could also argue that he feared rejection now that Maxwell had “written [him] off as an improvident, evil-minded, alcoholic breakdown.” While proceeds from the movie The Swimmer were still in suspense, however, Cheever grudgingly—and apprehensively—sent Maxwell the masterly first chapter of Bullet Park (“Paint me a small railroad station then …”): “I think Bill will praise it,” he wrote in his journal. “I think then that he will be very sad and will, by innuendo, suggest that I have lost my marbles and my gifts.” When Maxwell did, in fact, praise and publish the piece, Cheever had mixed feelings at best (“I was happier as an outcast”). By then he was irate over the rise of Donald Barthelme and similar writers, whose stories began to dominate the magazine's pages in the late sixties, when surrealism and black humor were in favor—the sort of fiction, in other words, that had excited the editors’ dismay when Cheever had written a less blatant version of it a few years before. “[T]he stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me,” he wrote Maxwell in 1969. “One can always begin: ‘Mr. Frobisher, returning from a year in Europe, opened his trunk for the customs officer and found there, instead of his clothing and souvenirs, the mutilated and naked body of an Italian sailor.’ Blooey. It's like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago.” Privately he referred to Barthelme as “Shawn's chosen surrealist,” and in moments of particular (and more and more frequent) bitterness, he'd rail against the magazine for publishing so many of his “imitators” while neglecting him, as if it were a matter of deliberate malice: “I've done so much for them and they treat me like this!”

  This wasn't simply petulance on Cheever's part—it was a legitimate aesthetic grievance. Quite apart from the evolving taste of The New Yorker, he was deeply troubled by the “cataclysmic” vogue for postmodern experimentation, which waxed in outrageousness as time went on. In later years, he would deplore the incoherence of such widely praised novels as Gaddis's JR (“less than rubbish”), lamenting the “lost sense of literature as a voice that appeals to a communal sensibility.” As for all the talk about the “death of the novel,” Cheever considered it the sort of thing “one leaves to boors”: “That the complexities of contemporary life have overwhelmed the novel would be claimed only by someone who knew nothing of the history of the novel and of the novel's dependence upon change,” he wrote indignantly to The New York Review of Books. “I think not that the novel has been overwhelmed by the complexities of contemporary life, I think the novel is the only art form we possess that has approached any mastery of this storm.” Perhaps the greatest offender, in Cheever's view, was John Barth, whose sprawling works were built around idle metafictional tricks (“The sort of Pirandellismo that is used everywhere by everyone”), to which Cheever himself had resorted, but sparingly, almost from the beginning of his career (q.v., “Of Love: A Testimony” in 1935). He liked to tell of a time when he and Jean Stafford had been at a dinner party with Barth: “Jean said, drawing me aside, but not so far that Barth couldn't hear what she was
saying: ‘John, your reputation in American literature is very, very shaky. God knows what will happen to it, but if you put a knife in his back, you will be immortal.’ “

  Though he opposed experimentation for its own sake, Cheever was also an innovator who applauded any approach that made some useful contribution to what he understood to be literature—that is, an attempt to make sense of our lives. He adored The Armies of the Night, Mailer's take on the so-called nonfiction novel in which he (Mailer) appears, ingloriously, as a third-person character participating in the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Such a work made nonsense of the novel's supposed obsolescence, and was damnably readable besides. “[Mailer] is so wonderfully tough, sassy and brilliant that I find him the most cheerful figure on the literary scene,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “He can also be a brute, a bore, a pig and a bluff but not in this book.” Even Mailer's “fetid” insistence on lurid sexual detail was becoming more palatable to Cheever: “The World of Apples,” after all, had been his most explicit work yet, though even in that story he wrote “F–k” with hyphens and spoke of “flaming sword[s]” rather than penises and whatnot, which were so abundant in the work of certain contemporaries. Updike, for one, had proved that writing frankly about sex could be good art as well as good business: “John's new novel (Couples) has made him a millionaire,” Cheever reported a bit sadly in 1968. “It is obsessively venereal but the descriptions of undressed women are splendid.”