Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Cheever would soon get on the bandwagon where sex was concerned, but writing about politics was pretty much out of his ken. The only fictional use he would ever make of his Russian material, for instance, was in the (rather dirty) 1972 story, “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” where a few scenes set in Moscow serve the purpose of deploring the intrusion of politics into matters of the heart. But really it was the heart alone that interested Cheever. “Novels are about men and women and children and dogs,” he'd say, “not politics.” He could admire but not emulate Mailer's “mastery” of that particular storm, and his indifference was the same in life as in art. He was a conventional liberal who generally agreed with the Times editorial page; he was against Vietnam and racism and so forth. But when it came to making his views public—much less marching in support of them—he'd rather not: “I will not march because I am lazy, suffer from agoraphobia, will probably have a hangover, am afraid of the reactionary bullies who will hiss and boo me … am shy, timid, a born bystander, etc.”

  When Susan announced—a year after Tuskegee—that she would spend the summer working for civil rights in Jackson, Mississippi, Cheever did not conceal his exasperation. “The children are home but Susie goes off to Mississippi next week to teach and be stoned,” he wrote Maxwell. “It will be miserable and dangerous.” He attributed her zeal to a “rampant” blood strain originating with such abolitionist forebears as his “great uncle Ebenezer” (Thomas Butler rather, who may or may not have been persecuted by copperheads in Newbury-port). In fact, his feelings on this point were even more tortured than usual. At night he lay awake sensing Susan was in danger, and wondering whether he should brave a trip south (“with my numerous phobias”) and charm the local peckerwoods while absconding with his daughter—who soon phoned, in any case, asking for $350 in emergency funds, which Cheever promptly wired from White Plains. Likewise, when Ben went off to Antioch College in 1967, and did a few de rigueur days in the Cincinnati jail because of his part in an antiwar protest, Cheever was “proud of him” and managed to persuade the Western Union office to stay open late while he raised nine hundred dollars in cash for bail. Later, he claimed to have refused an invitation to give a speech in Cincinnati (“I told them I would not make a potholder in the city that had arrested my eldest son”), but more often than not he found his children's posturing a bit much: “As for Ben he was reclassified i-A on Friday,” he wrote, shortly after the Cincinnati incident. “Susie was particularly incensed and wanted to send him to Stockholm on the next plane. … I went to the draft board on Monday where the reclassification was declared a clerical error. Ben goes his feckless way.”

  The times were changing at such a rapid rate, though, that even Cheever's sixty-one-year-old brother was becoming part of the Scene. After two years of sobriety, Fred moved to Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 1966 to be with his estranged wife and three of their children, who'd originally gone west to get away from him, but now found him delightful. Ann had scarcely known her father as a sober man, and was struck by how “knowledgeable and compassionate” he was: he liked to “rap” (his word) about the thriving counterculture in Boulder, and meanwhile he bought a motorcycle and dumped his wizened, chainsmoking wife for a thirty-five-year-old physicist named Sabine, for whose benefit he got monkey-gland injections.

  But the more things changed the more they stayed the same, at least in one respect: “Dear Joey,” Fred wrote, not long after his arrival in Boulder. “For no explainable reason except perhaps over-exertion in moving, my bad ankle has become a problem and for the past three weeks I haven't been able to walk on it.” He'd managed to keep his PR job at a local radio station, he said, but his salary had been halved until he could return to work, and therefore he wondered if John could “underwrite [his] next two months to the tune of $1,500 or $2,000,” which would allow him to feed himself and go on paying Ann's tuition. John patiently replied: “I'm enclosing a small check because it's all I have. I can't produce two thousand dollars out of thin air and I don't know who can. … If Annie would write and tell me what she needs in the way of tuition I will see what I can do about this. I realize that this will be embarrassing for Annie but it seems to be the only way of doing it.” One year later, Fred was sufficiently back on his feet to take a trip to England, stopping for a night in Ossining before catching his plane. While John simpered and drank and wished his brother would go away (even the man's rejuvenation was vaguely unsettling), Fred went on about the splendors of Boulder and reminisced about the family. “After twenty-five years of acute alcoholism, paranoia and marital mayhem,” John wrote Exley, “[Fred] appears at sixty-two, handsome, intelligent, sober and well-dressed. We sat up late, the Good Brother and the Bad Brother. The Good Brother (me) drank nearly a quart of bourbon while the Bad Brother sipped a gingerale. At breakfast the Bad Brother was all charm and composure. The Good Brother was one fucking mess.”

  BY THE MID-SIXTIES, Cheever's furtive trips to the pantry were an almost daily ritual. The morning's work was usually done by ten-thirty, whereupon he'd retire either to the terrace if the weather was fine (he could hear the telephone ring and see people come and go) or downstairs to his wing chair, where he'd sit chain-smoking and pretending to read while casing the situation: Iole, perhaps, was puttering around the kitchen and would have to be distracted, or else his wife and/or children were lingering over their coffee and newspaper. Meanwhile the gin bottles sang and sang. When the coast was clear, Cheever would hit the pantry like a shot and pour a few “scoops,” but if the others were still hanging around as late as half past eleven or so, he'd often excuse himself (irritably) and drive to the liquor store, then park in some leafy area on the way home and “take a big pull at the bottle, spilling a lot of gin over [his] chin.”

  He knew he was destroying himself, but the prospect of stopping or even tapering off seemed preposterous. Sometimes he felt all right when he woke up (albeit hungover to some greater or lesser degree), but within an hour or two the cafará would “[move] in like tear-gas,” and if he didn't get a drink he'd suffer an almost maddening malaise. Better to drink and calm down and wonder, sometimes tearfully, what was to become of him. “I keep reading biographies of Fitzgerald and I always get to bawling at the end,” he wrote a friend. “I read on a terrace where no can see me and when he goes out to Los Angeles for the last time I start crying and I weep right through to the end.” Perhaps this was meant to be taken somewhat tongue in cheek, but in fact Cheever could hardly have identified more with Fitzgerald, whose “torments” (and fate?) seemed very like his own. “Shall I dwell on the crucifixion of the diligent novelist?” he wrote, thinking of Fitzgerald. “The writer cultivates, extends, raises, and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by lethal doses of heroin or alcohol.”

  As it was, his condition was literally paralyzing. The “gethsemane” of train travel—and he did, after all, have to go to the city now and then—would begin on the platform, where he was attacked by a vertigo so severe that he'd clutch a column, anything, lest the pavement “fly up and hit [him] between the eyes.” Then, if he actually managed to get on board, his panic would mount until sometimes he had to get off in the vicinity of Tarrytown or Yonkers; otherwise he'd “get bombed” (more so) in the toilet or perhaps take one of his “massive” tranquilizers, which left him floating in a limbo wherein his “hands seem[ed] to drop off.” And it wasn't just trains, but almost any form of travel whatsoever: “I bitterly resent these infringements on my life,” he wrote. “I can barely walk, I plainly cannot drive, I can't cross bridges and since we have been taught that we received what we deserve I wonder what I have been guilty of to suffer so.” But he never wondered long. On the rare occasion when he was able to goad himself all
the way to Manhattan, he'd come face to face with the horror his body had been warning him against (always beginning with a painful, telltale tug in his scrotum): “Walking on Madison Avenue I had been tormented with the thought that my sins would be discovered although I claim to have committed no sins. My children will vilify and disown me, my loving dogs will bark at me, even the cleaning woman will spit in my direction.”

  Under the circumstances, the shelter of his marriage was more important than ever, though it was also a humiliating reminder that he was all but incapable now of performing the procreative act. As he wrote in his journal of an aptly named persona, “If he [Fallow] could make love to a woman it proved that he was not the sexual criminal he sometimes thought himself to be. His manhood seemed to reside between Priscilla's legs.” He and Mary still tried from time to time, but it was no use: at best he could get started a bit, but rarely (if ever) finish. To pre-empt failure—and rebel against his wife's terrible power—Cheever adopted the stratagem of insulting her when sex seemed imminent, with the predictable result that she would then refuse to proceed, or at least protest at some length, in which case Cheever was known to quote Moses Wapshot: “You've talked yourself out of a fuck.” (“He liked to say that,” Mary recalled. “Of course, the fallacy of that is, who would want to fuck anybody who talked to them that way?”) By way of reprisal, Mary could be somewhat pre-emptive herself: “I can't bear to be gentled by an impotent man,” she remarked, departing to cook potatoes rather than endure his tentative caresses. “I'm not impotent with other women!” he called after her (admitting in his journal, “This is a damned lie, since all I've done is neck with other women”).

  Finally Cheever had had enough of his wife's “needless darkness”—obviously, she was a “castrator” like his mother, and moreover a “serious manic-depressive” like her sister. “She naturally resists this admission and looking around for some other explanation for her profound unhappiness she has settled on me,” he reflected. “This accounts for the depth of her aversion to me, the intensity of her hatred.” Lest he “destroy [him]self “ by “accommodating] her madness,” he decided to present his case to a reputable psychiatrist, David C. Hays. During their first appointment in July 1966, Cheever explained to Hays that he was there for his wife's sake, adverting to the history of insanity in her family and noting her particular resemblance to Buff. He could no longer abide her moodiness and “tongue lashings,” he said, and advised Dr. Hays to have a talk with her and help her understand her problem in clinical terms. “So I go to the shrink,” he wrote. “I feel much better talking to him. He does seem a little angular, a little inclined to contradict and interrupt. … Mary will go see him, and how wonderful it would be if we could clear this up.” Mary was happy to comply. When the doctor inquired about her “moodiness” and so on, she sweetly replied that Cheever was far moodier than she, and though it was true she was cold at times, this was simply a defense (“she has built up an armament,” Hays noted, “so that he can't hurt her anymore”). When Cheever observed how cheerful Mary seemed after chatting with the man, he was delighted: “[T]he trouble seems over, the ice is broken. … I adore her, worship her, love her, live within her and wake in the morning for the first time in weeks without a cafard. I would like to wake her, embrace her, kiss her, screw her, screw her and screw her again but instead I go downstairs and make the coffee.” Meanwhile Dr. Hays had jotted down the following in regard to Cheever: “egocentric, narcissistic, evasive … very active fantasy life.”

  The couple went together for the next session, the resolution of which Cheever had pictured in terms of “a musical comedy”: “We would embrace, kiss on the threshold of his office and tie on a can after the children had gone to the movies.” But he was brutally disappointed. “The picture, as I saw it, was that I, an innocent and fortunate creature, had married a woman with deep psychic disturbances,” he grimly recorded afterward. “The picture, as it was presented to me, was of a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife.” While Dr. Hays outlined a program of treatment—individual and group therapy for the husband, whereas the wife needn't return except for an occasional joint session—Cheever mentally impugned the man's credibility. He wore garters, for one, holding up socks that had silly clocks printed on them; he used a lot of “specious jargon” like “meaningful” (fourteen times), “interpersonal” (twelve), “longitudinal” (nine), and “structure” (two); and, worst of all—by far—he'd never read any of Cheever's books!

  Mary and Federico departed for Treetops, and Cheever was left to brood alone. It was the “friendless” part that really rankled. By God, just the other day he'd gone to Westport with his great friend Art Spear, and lunched with Burt Lancaster, no less! And even as he sat there brooding (so he reported to Weaver), the telephone rang: “[I]t was Esquire saying that they were doing a spread of Janet Landgard and that Janet had asked if dear Mister Shiffers would please write her captions because she didn't want her captions written by anyone but Shiffers and I said that I would write the captions and that's the way things stand.” Also, as luck would have it, Hope Lange and Alan Pakula were in town with their friend Sharman Douglas—daughter of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James—and the three took Cheever to East Hampton for the weekend. Thus he returned to Dr. Hays with his guns loaded, taking a seat and silently noting the tacky objets all over the office (“Does he know anything about music, literature, painting, baseball? I think not”); then, hearing the word “friendless” again, he returned fire: “I said that I had just had a very friendly weekend with Hope, Alan, and Sharman …” But Hays only shook his head: “He explained that I had developed a social veneer—an illusion of friendship—that was meant to conceal my basic hostility and alienation.” (The next day Cheever wrote his wife, “[Hays's] mouth seems a little blubbery and he is not always successful in keeping his hands away from it.”)

  Despite his dislike of Hays's characterizations, Cheever seemed willing to cooperate up to a point. When Hays, a Freudian, asked him about his childhood, Cheever obligingly touched on what seemed the most salient issues: his father had wanted him aborted, and growing up he'd found himself caught in the middle of a “power struggle” between his parents, which his mother had won, thereby planting a fear of women as the “predatory sex.” That said, Cheever wanted to hurry along to what he viewed as the root of his anxieties: “I would like to discuss, to ventilate, my homosexual problems,” he wrote before the subsequent (fourth) session, to which he arrived bearing an autographed copy of The Wapshot Chronicle. As Cheever began (with “some circumspection”) to broach the matter of homosexuality, Hays made it clear that he wanted to talk about the mother more—a lot more. When Cheever mentioned his dalliance with Sara Spencer, for example, Hays speculated that the woman was perhaps his “good mother” and Mary his “bad mother,” or so Cheever might have (unconsciously) conceived it. Be that as it may (“Who profits by concluding that Mrs. Zagreb is my mother?”), the patient tried to retrieve his previous thread, asking if he could speak about his brother, Fred; Hays gave him “a frightfully condescending smile” and suggested they'd get around to that later. As Cheever mused, “[I]t would be a thousand dollars or more before I could say what was on my mind.”

  “Some years ago I went to a psychiatrist who told me I was obsessed with my Mother,” he later wrote Litvinov. “When I told him that I liked to swim he said: Mother. When I told him that I liked the rain he said: Mother. When I told him that I drank too much he said: Mother.” Toward the end Cheever began arriving late, tipsy, and tended to be sort of suavely impertinent. “I lost a fifty-dollar bet with Mary about your religion,” he announced at the outset of their penultimate (eighth) session: he thought Hays was an Irish Catholic, but in fact he was Jewish, as Mary had claimed. For his part, Hays would urge the patient, repeatedly, to participate in group therapy too, but the latter refused or simply evaded the su
bject. Finally—when Hays reiterated that Cheever seemed to project onto his marital relationship certain unresolved conflicts with his mother—Cheever flatly declared, “I don't like to talk about any of these things.” Then (in a “very friendly” way, Hays recalled) he said he wouldn't be coming back anymore, but thanked Hays all the same and said he'd helped a little, which may have been somewhat sincere: “I realize that my own infirmities contribute to [Mary's] unhappiness,” he wrote, after deciding to quit therapy. “The microscopic scrutiny I bring to every note of her voice, every footstep, is a morbid exacerbation of our incompatibility but it cannot account for those weeks and months when I am the object of every disappointment and dislike in her world.” This was a fair synthesis, more or less, and then there were times when Cheever was inclined to accept even the most damning of Hays's insights: “And drunk I think perhaps the shrink is right, perhaps I am capable only of parasitism, dependence and imposture disguised as love …”

  ONE WEEK after his final session with Hays, Cheever managed the long drive to Yaddo for the annual board meeting, Tappan Zee Bridge and all. He was aghast, however, by what he found there: the eighty-one-year-old Elizabeth Ames was virtually surrounded by homosexuals, despite her stern assertions about excluding them whenever possible. This was the same “terrifying ambivalence,” thought Cheever, that he'd detected in his own mother—that is, an impulse to condemn perversion on the one hand, and to castrate her son on the other, the better to ensure “a gentle companion” in her lonely old age. Actually, Cheever wasn't quite sure about some of Ames's entourage, but at least one—Ned Rorem—he knew to be “a famous cocksucker”: “N[ed] who I've been told claims, in his public confession, to have been blown and buggered by half the French Academy …” The “confession” was Rorem's recently published Paris Diary, a remarkably candid account of gay culture that had elevated Rorem to the status of “America's official queer, goyim division,” as the author put it.