Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Perhaps the most controversial part of the novel is the last few pages, where Nailles saves his son's life. Years later Cheever wrote in his journal that the scene “was almost never understood” and he wondered if he “could have done better.” If he was still wondering at that point, then he must have felt as though he'd accomplished at least something of what he'd intended: namely, a scene in which Nailles is able to “implement” his love for Tony in some redemptive, heroic fashion, and thereby recognize the reality of evil as embodied by Hammer and reflected somewhat in himself and the rest of humanity. And yet this climactic episode—so essential to the novel's gravitas—is written almost as slapstick. In oddly flat, declarative prose, Cheever describes his determined murderer, Hammer, dragging the unconscious Tony to the altar and dousing him with gasoline—then deciding to pause and smoke a cigarette and go on smoking as long as it takes for Nailles to drive home, fetch a chainsaw, and return to the locked church:

  “Hammer?” [Nailles calls from outside]

  “Yes.”

  “Is Tony all right?”

  “He's all right now but I'm going to kill him. First I want to finish this cigarette.”

  … [Nailles] made a diagonal slash across the door and broke it easily with his shoulders. Hammer was sitting in a front pew, crying. The red gasoline tank was beside him. Nailles lifted his son off the altar and carried him out into the rain.

  And then—quite abruptly, just as Gottlieb said—the novel is over. We are told with slapdash brevity that Hammer confessed to attempted homicide and was quoted in the newspaper as explaining that he meant “to awaken the world” (but why, given that he'd asserted earlier that he accepted the world for what it is and rather was motivated by his victim's “excellence”?), and so we are brought to the final sentence: “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.” Now, if this be irony—and four “wonderful's” would seem to suggest as much—then we must surmise that life is not wonderful in Bullet Park and never was, and besides Nailles still needs to take tranquilizers just to get through the day. So nothing has changed; but if that's true, then what's the point of the whole triumphant rescue? What, for that matter, is the point of the novel? As Joyce Carol Oates concluded her review, “Irony so pervades Cheever's writing that one cannot tell where whimsy [ends] and a real nastiness, a profound nastiness, begins. Is everything wonderful in Bullet Park? It may well be.” If one of our most prominent novelist-critics (and an “ideal reader” of Cheever to boot) was perplexed, it's safe to assume a lot of general readers were, too.

  But at the time, the reader whose opinion mattered most was Benjamin DeMott. After he “dumped on [the book] in the Times,“ said Cheever, “everybody picked up their marbles and ran home.” Knopf stopped advertising, and sales petered out at just over thirty-three thousand copies—a little better than dismal, given all the advance hype and Cheever's reputation. Still, he affected to take it in stride. After all, he'd made enough money to last him at least two years, he said, “and one couldn't ask for more.” But how long was two years, under the circumstances? Cheever had taken four years to write Bullet Park, and perhaps five times as long to work his way to some acceptable version of The Wapshot Chronicle, and never mind that he was now an almost hopeless alcoholic who felt only the faintest impulse to write anything. Federico never forgot his own sense of dread that Thanksgiving, when he overheard Lehmann-Haupt say to his father—who nodded benignly (“Oh, really?”)—that the novel didn't really hang together and DeMott had been right.* Behind the insouciant façade, though, Cheever fully shared his younger son's dread. Before long, he decided he didn't like Bullet Park either (“I think something misfired”), and was only a little cheered, two and a half years later, when John Gardner wrote a long vindication of the novel for the Times Book Review, declaring that its detractors had been “dead wrong”: “Bullet Park is a novel to pore over, move around in, live with. The image repetitions, the stark and subtle correspondences that create the book's ambiguous meaning, its uneasy courage and compassion, sink in and in, like a curative spell.”

  Perhaps, but at the time it seemed too little, too late—at any rate there was no particular resurgence of interest, and Cheever continued (for the rest of his life, really) to brood over the DeMott review. Sometimes he agreed with the man, agreed with Lehmann-Haupt, and went on thinking the book was a botch; at other, more spirited moments, he accused DeMott of “plugging for tenure at Amherst,” and meanwhile his loathing for academics—considerable at the best of times—became even more pronounced. A year or so after Bullet Park had quietly disappeared, Cheever responded to some pompous remarks from one of his wife's Briarcliff colleagues by hurling a glass of bourbon at the man. “I aimed for the head but I got him in the stomach,” he wrote Litvinov. “He is a frustrated professor of English and I have come to consider frustration a most dangerous human condition.”

  * The pool was built, of course, and Cheever made the most of it. During his visits he held court there almost every afternoon—often in the nude, despite the relative modesty of certain peers. Hortense Calisher, for one, never forgot her shock when a naked Cheever popped out of the water and sat beside her, chatting amiably about one thing and another.

  * Cheever got his own back by damning Lehmann-Haupt's journalism with fainter and fainter praise: “Well, Christopher,” he observed a few years later, “you've settled in and become a highly—ah—reliable reviewer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  {1969-1970}

  IN 1968, HOPE LANGE had resumed her career with a starring role in the sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, about a spirited widow who moves her family into an old New England cottage and befriends its resident ghost. Each week Cheever watched the show and made casual asides to Federico (his perennial TV companion) suggesting that he knew a lot of inside dope about the pretty actress who played Mrs. Muir. By then Lange had separated from Alan Pakula, and in early 1969, during a trip to New York, she gave Cheever a call and the two went skating at Rockefeller Center; either that time or the next, the relationship became carnal—or rather as carnal as Cheever could manage: “We rip off our clothes [at the Biltmore] and spend three or four lovely hours together,” he wrote in his journal, “moving from the sofa to the floor and back to the sofa again. I don't throw a proper hump, which disconcerts no one … so it's all finger-fucking, sucking, tongue-eating, arse-kissing, bone-cracking embraces and earnest declarations of love …” A woman of extravagant candor, Lange would later characterize Cheever as “the horniest man [she] ever met” (impotence withal), if a bit “overly concerned with his own needs”: “[He was] like a high-school quarterback who wants to get his rocks off,” she said, echoing the consensus opinion.

  Though meetings with the actress were sporadic at best, Cheever rarely missed a chance to boast about his “mistress” whatever the company, particularly if his wife was in earshot. “I suppose it's possible to love two women,” he sighed, clasping Mary's hand across the dinner table, having returned from a tryst in time to sit down to a nice home-cooked meal. (“He may be unfaithful,” said Mary, “he may be a drunk, but he always came home for dinner.”) Often his references to Lange were merely in passing, though he could be spiteful if he thought the occasion warranted it. “I'll be taking the train back with you,” he announced to some overnight guests (and indirectly his wife) at breakfast; “I have a date with Hope.” One night he even phoned his daughter—as if casting about for a loved one to share his happiness—and said he was leaving her mother at last and marrying “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But of course this was never really in the cards. For one thing, Lange could hardly understand half of what Cheever was saying, because of his muttering accent; besides, he always had to catch an early train back to Ossining. And finally, for all his gloating infatuation, Cheever had to admit (at least to himself) that his feelings didn't run all that deep—Lange was simply �
��the sunny side of the street,” as he put it: “[Hope's] brightness precludes shadowy and immortal longings. … It is only that [I am] happy and light-hearted in her company.”

  Still, he was disgruntled enough at first to consider following his lover to the Coast and starting anew, until one day in March he suffered what seemed a rather minor skiing injury. As he wrote Lange, “Swooping (or so I thought) among the trees in the orchard I went down like a tray of dishes and tore all the ligaments in my left knee.” Fitted with a plaster cast from hip to foot, Cheever was gratified when his wife responded with sweet solicitude (as ever in the case of any stricken creature, be it husband, dog, or deer*), and he supposed it might even prove a good thing, for a while, to “substitute physical pain and infirmity for melancholy.” It didn't, however, work out that way: not only did Cheever's cafará increase (“it fills the house like smoke”), but the injury took a long time to heal, and meanwhile Cheever began to bloat with alcoholic edema. More than ever, writing was out of the question—indeed, he found it hard to type a single declarative sentence. The best he could muster, on a good day, was a few lines in his journal and/or a distressful letter or two. “I can't write you a story,” he wrote Maxwell. “I can't write anyone a story. I know that Bullet Park is not that massive but six months later I still feel poleaxed. Twice I seem to have had a donnee but I don't seem to have any motive for following through.” Rather than blame his funk entirely on a failing liver and attendant malaise, Cheever figured he'd exhausted some aspect of his career (such as writing about “the minutiae of upper-middle-class life”), and would simply have to wait and be patient until some fresh aesthetic approach presented itself.

  And so the willpower that had driven Cheever to become one of the greatest writers of his time—despite everything—was now reduced to restraining him, a little, from racing to the pantry for his first drink of the day. “First scoop at half past nine,” he'd tabulate, or “Held off this morning until eleven-twenty-two.” Whereas in the past he'd taken care not to let his family see him drinking before lunch, these days it was a little too much to ask. One morning Cheever was pretending as usual to read the Times, his antennae tingling while his wife moved around in the kitchen—arranging flowers, cracking eggs, and finally (just as he thought she was about to go outside and hang laundry) unfolding the ironing board “to [his] absolute horror”: “She seldom, if ever, irons, and this maneuver seemed to me unfair. I supposed she was going to iron the wrinkles out of the dress she would wear to lunch. This oughtn't to take more than five minutes, but five minutes was more than I could wait, and in full view of my wife, and the world, I went in the pantry and mixed a drink. It was eighteen minutes to eleven.” Amid such petty embarrassments and racking hangovers, Cheever wondered and wondered why he drank so murderously much—after all, his wife was being nice to him for a little while, ditto his dogs and children, and there was plenty of money in the bank. At the Yaddo meeting that year, Cheever listened with a lugubrious face while Philip Roth went on about the shortcomings of fame: Since Portnoy's Complaint, he'd been mobbed for autographs wherever he went and could hardly go to the theater anymore, etc. By way of reply, Cheever said he was quitting everything—Yaddo, Institute, Century, everything—and letting younger folk like Roth take his place. “I've had my career,” he sighed, “and now it's over.”*

  As Cheever's gloom that autumn suggests, his recent therapy with a new psychiatrist hadn't borne much fruit. “Today I go to see Dr. Silverberg,” he'd written in his journal on May 20, 1969 (his first entry in at least two months). “Hip Hip Hooray.” Next entry: “Hip hip hooray. I see Dr. Silverberg but I am too sauced to remember anything about his appearance beyond the fact that he wears a ring.” Dr. J. William Silverberg's notes serve to corroborate this: “[Patient] seems quite drunk … and forgets what he had said a few minutes before.” One thing the patient definitely (if superfluously) said was that he was “drinking too much,” and the following week he elaborated that he'd been depressed for quite a while. There were a lot of problems in his life—trains, bridges, phobias of one sort and another—but his “most important conflict” was homosexuality: “I've never confessed this to anyone before,” he said, admitting to a total of three encounters in his lifetime, most recently in December.* All this was due, he speculated, to the pressure he felt having to “prove his sexual prowess over and over again”—a statement that led happily to the subject of Hope Lange, who nowadays figured in his ritual for getting out of bed in the morning, thus: “Hope is coming and she's beautiful and loves me and I must get up …” And what about his wife? “At present she's quite rejecting,” Cheever said, adding (with a slight chuckle) that the reason was “unclear” to him.

  After the first few sessions, Cheever decided he'd “exhausted [his] secrets” and returned to the delicate mischief he'd practiced on Dr. Hays. “But I'm concerned about you,“ he'd say when Silverberg tried directing him back to the matter at hand. At one point the doctor mentioned he was planning a trip to Rome, whereupon Cheever seized on the subject again and again—hotels, restaurants, monuments the man simply must see in order to have a satisfactory experience. As with Hays, Cheever presented Silverberg with an autographed copy of The Wapshot Chronicle, and even invited the man to have dinner with his family. And sometimes, still, he'd drop all the tourist talk and resume his role as a proper analysand: for all his success—he announced one day—he felt like “a wreck of [him]self,” though he did try to be “good tempered” about things (citing his recent leg injury). When the doctor pursued such remarks with questions about (say) Cheever's “need for a passive-dependent role,” the latter would dodge away and insist they keep chatting as if they were guests at a cocktail party. And so it went until “a rather diffuse rambling final session” in mid-July when Cheever wondered aloud what he was gaining from all this. Silverberg wondered, too: despite the odd soulful revelation, Cheever had never asked him for a bit of advice, seeming instead to be “much concerned with how people [were] reacting to him and giving him enough applause for his charm, wit, and success.” In any event, Cheever phoned later that summer and officially terminated therapy (politely, of course), and meanwhile Silverberg arrived at much the same conclusion as his predecessor: “[Cheever's] major personality trait is his narcissism, and underneath it all is tremendous self-doubt.”

  IN THE MIDST of all this, Mary decided (“a little like Zelda,” said her suffering husband) to give a lavish black-tie dinner gala in honor of Susan and Rob Cowley who were leaving that July for a long sojourn in Majorca. Outside the house on Cedar Lane were a tent and dance floor and four-piece band, while the illustrious local literati—the Ellisons, Maxwells, Warrens, et al.—came to pay tribute to the promising young couple. The whole glamorous bash might have been an almost perfect success were it not for a memorably long line to the only available bathroom, not to mention a host who seemed far too drunk even by the standards of the present gathering (though, as ever, he tried to be ingratiating: “You'll notice there isn't anybody from Knopfhere!” he whispered to his old friend and Harper editor, Frances Lindley).

  A month later, the Cheevers followed their daughter and son-in-law to the coastal town of Deya, demesne of the poet Robert Graves. Along for the trip was Cheever's niece Ann, the idea being that she'd look after the twelve-year-old Federico while the adults enjoyed themselves. “Uncle John was a terrible traveler,” she recalled. “He didn't like to fly, and before every takeoff he'd lean across the aisle and cross himself on the chest.” Also, he was disastrously unorganized, and had to be shooed from one place to the next lest they miss a plane or lose luggage. (Ann's luggage, for one, was lost; she borrowed clothes for most of the trip.) Susan had arranged for them to stay in a quaint little pensione owned by one of Graves's sons, but Mary found the place dreary and raffish. When she complained about the towels, Cheever advised her to get along then to the Madrid Ritz, where the towels were better—a magisterial dismissal that delighted him, in part because he could actually
afford the Ritz (for now). Meanwhile, in Deya—where Cheever remained with niece and son—the pensione was less than three dollars a day, wine was nine cents a bottle, and Cheever seemed moderately content to limp among the olive and lemon trees each morning down to the sea, where he'd swim and read and then limp back to a little café for gin and tonic. One night he had dinner with Graves and entourage, which consisted mostly of the genial Cheever feeding the great man questions about the White Goddess and so forth (“he is a kind of prince, scourge, God and war-memorial,” Cheever wrote a friend, while describing Graves in his journal as “slippery and sinister”). At some point, too, Cheever developed a crush on the pretty Dutch wife of another literary expatriate (a biographer), and once Federico caught a glimpse of his father sitting with the woman at dusk—”her looking a bit awkward, him looking hungry.”

  That hungry look was well known to Ben's girlfriend, Lynda, who was about to become part of the family. While in high school, the girl had been a fetching cheerleader who was somewhat disaffected from her straitlaced parents, and hence amenable to her doting future father-in-law. “I spend a lot of time kissing her, and she doesn't mind,” Cheever gleefully mused in the summer of 1967. “What about a man making out with his son's date? What about that?” The idyll ended with a nasty shock, however, when Cheever found an unmailed letter from Ben to Lynda describing him and his wife as “the two most self-centered animals in the creation”—this after he'd given the boy a brand-new sports car (a white Austin-Healey Sprite)! Once Ben had departed for his freshman year at Antioch (in the sports car), Cheever sublimated his grief by drafting a high-minded rebuttal to “Tony Nailles” in his journal: “You say that we are the most self-centered people in the world when, in fact, our love for you verges on fatuity,” etc. At other times Cheever considered subtle forms of reprisal, such as “disinherit[ing]” his son as a correspondent: “I will deprive him of the delight and humor of my letters,” he reflected, but decided this was “contemptible petulance” and so continued to sign himself “Best, Father” and “Yrs, John.” (“There is some capriciousness in the love I feel for my children,” he'd observed some years earlier. “I seize their love greedily when I need it; and am indifferent, callous when my needs lie elsewhere.”)