Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  That Christmas (1967) Ben had returned from Ohio with a beard and shaven head, having proved his mettle as a peacenik with his three-day stint in the Cincinnati jail. “You don't know anything until you've been roughed up by the Man!” he reportedly told his father, who called him Myshkin. Ben made it clear that he'd grown away from his elders, but, having said that, continued to keep his father company and talk about whatever was on his mind. Antioch students had to spend part of each year on a work assignment, so after Christmas Ben went back to the small Dayton suburb of Vandalia, where he was supposed to work as a newspaper reporter. As it happened, Vandalia didn't have much use for another reporter, and he was soon laid off. Far from taking the news amiss, his father promptly offered to send money. “If he was sober and you were in trouble,” said Ben, “he was great. It was always possible, though, in three months or four weeks from then, he'd get drunk and say, ‘Can't even hold a job!’”

  By the summer of 1968, Cheever was often drunk, and his son had arguably become an even more representative member of his generation. The two didn't mix so well, though not exactly for lack of trying. Soon after he came home for a summer visit, Ben and one of his Antioch friends brought a guest to Cedar Lane—a somber thirteen-year-old named Ellen (the friend's sister), who'd run away from a strict father to the drug-ridden streets of the East Village. The Cheevers professed to keep an open-door policy (the Martha debacle was still a few months in the future), and Cheever did his best to be an engaging host. Clowning for the girl one night, he placed a cork table-mat on his head. “Queen for a day,” the girl quipped. “The remark, perhaps innocent, seems to fell me,” Cheever wrote in his journal, fretfully recounting a dream in which the girl told him, “Your whole life is a lie. I can see right through you. …” Still disconcerted, perhaps, Cheever threw a heavy crystal glass at another of Ben's friends, Doug Brayfield, a “beautiful young man” (Ben remembered) who fancied himself a poet; no one can remember the exact provocation—apart from the poetic airs—though later Cheever admitted to Dr. Silverberg that he'd been agitated by homosexual desire for one of Ben's friends.* In what might have been a further attempt to rally himself, Cheever dropped his trousers at a subsequent party and began chasing one of Mary's comelier Briarcliff students. The girl was a good sport about things, but Ben was appalled and tried to intercede. His father paused, pants around his ankles, and regarded his son with considerable asperity. “When did you start wearing a red necktie?” he demanded at last. Rather than remind Cheever of his own sartorial lapse, Ben found himself abashed: “Oh my God,” he thought. “What am I doing wearing a red necktie?” (“Never wear red necktie,” Leander Wapshot had bluntly advised his sons.) Observing that Ben often seemed cowed by his famous father, certain of his friends tried to be protective—especially a “fearless and bohemian” girl named Nina, who made hay of the fact that Ben had broken up with Lynda that summer. “I'm coming to rescue you from your father,” she'd say, before conspicuously dragging him upstairs to bed for hours on end, reappearing only for dinner. Cheever—doubtless more offended by the girl's dislike of him than by her brazenness—laid down his fork one night and called her a whore. He was very drunk, of course, but it still caused a ripple.

  A year later Ben had reconciled with Lynda, who in turn was getting on better with her parents, while all concerned had cooled toward Cheever. When he returned from Deya on September 2, 1969, his son informed him that he and Lynda were to be married two days later. For the occasion Ben had hastily purchased a suit at an Ossining haberdasher that fit him “the way suits fit bears and chimpanzees in the circus,” as his father put it; because of the suit, Ben's mother wept bitterly during the ceremony. When it was over, Cheever merrily rang the church bell while the newlyweds roared away on a motorcycle; the guests repaired to a reception at the home of the bride's parents, where Cheever's old friend Sally Swope swore that she'd seen actual plastic flamingos on the front lawn. “Her Father is in charge of security at IBM,” Cheever wrote Litvinov. “He is a pleasant, slender man with a thin and absolutely permenant [sic] smile. … She must have been quite a pretty woman. They neither drink nor smoke nor do they read.”* Sizing up the flamingos and so forth, Cheever weaved over to Lynda's mother and contrived to put her at ease over what he perceived to be their relatively modest means: “He's never going to make any money,” said Cheever, meaning his Myshkin-like son, “but it doesn't matter, because I have plenty of it!”

  In the months and years that followed, Cheever observed with bemusement while his son defected more and more to his in-laws, alleged flamingos and all. Lynda's parents liked to visit the couple in Ohio and even attend classes with them, and during holidays Ben seemed to ration his appearances on Cedar Lane as frugally as possible. His mother-in-law fussed over him as if he were her own darling boy; his father-in-law taught him how to tune cars and such. Since the man really didn't bother with much in the way of intellectual diversion, he spent most of his leisure hours happily engaged in home improvement. Cheever once gave the couple a lift to Lynda's house, where he was intrigued to find her father meticulously patching holes in his driveway with a little caulking gun; indeed, the driveway was so immaculate “you could eat breakfast off it,” as Ben recalled. “If that's what you really like to do,” said Cheever affably, “you should come over to our house, because we have a much larger driveway and much more satisfactory holes!” Lynda's father might have kept his permanent smile afloat, but the rest of his face turned crimson with rage. “A few of those incidents went a long way,” said Ben. “My older son seems seriously to have switched his allegiance from me to his father-in-law,” Cheever wrote shortly after the wedding. “This is no cause for feeling, merely something to be observed.”

  As for the whole hippie thing, Cheever tried to make light of it with remarks about “Myshkin” and the like, but he found it a little dispiriting. The blond cheerleader type was a solemn ideal of his, and now that such a girl had married his son, Cheever expected them to have a brilliant, elegant life together. Instead, Ben's beard grew longer and more Christlike, while his fetching wife sat around sewing psychedelic patches on his bell-bottoms. But then, that was the ethos of Antioch in those days, and when the Cheevers came to Yellow Springs for a visit in early 1970, Ben took pains to soften the blow. He and Lynda bought a big roast beef (though they weren't sure how to cook it), as well as a new table, curtains, and an ounce of premium marijuana. The last was for themselves, to steady the nerves a bit; stoned out of his gourd, Ben drove his customized van to the airport that afternoon to collect his parents and younger brother—”a nightmarish ride”: “It was like I was talking Greek and he was talking Serbian,” Ben remembered, though perhaps he underestimated his father's own mellow intoxication. (“We take the plane to Ohio,” blandly noted the latter. “My beloved son meets us and we dine with his much beloved wife.”) Another treat Ben had planned was lunch with Louis Filler, an eminent cultural conservative whose dim view of the younger generation seemed to square with Cheever's. (When Ben had boasted about a paper he'd written on the subject of Chagall, his father erupted: “Five minutes from here at the Union Church there are nine of Chagall's windows! And yet you'd never bestir yourself to look at them, and that's the trouble with your generation!”) But of course this was an awful mistake: no academic alive was likely to ingratiate himself with Cheever, who moreover wasn't even able to weather the ordeal with a few cocktails because of the local blue laws. “So,” said Ben, “Daddy's thinking gin, and Louis Filler's thinking Meeting of Two Great Minds.” When Filler remarked that some modicum of sociological knowledge was imperative to the making of great literature, Cheever “laid him out”: Sociology hasn't a thing to do with literature! etc. Filler fell silent and pretty much stayed that way*

  After the visit, relations with the couple deteriorated rapidly. Ben's wife not only stopped flirting with Cheever, she hardly spoke to him, and even refused his well-meaning invitations to dinner and whatnot. “I will not go over there for dinner
!” he overheard her yelling in the background when he called Ben on the telephone. “I can't stand that old man!” Even worse was the cringing way his son tried to remonstrate with her, using a lot of unctuous endearments like “Monkey” and “Honeybear.” Cheever wondered in his journal, “Is it possible that because of the ups and downs of our marriage he has come to feel that married happiness even if it means the loss of intelligence and character is desirable?” In practice, the whole Cheever family did their best to help Ben see how silly and victimized he seemed. “That's the way Lynda likes it!” was the constant, singsong, mocking refrain, especially when there were other guests to be entertained. Of course, they knew it was the essence of Ben's nature to placate—after all, he'd spent his entire life trying to please a demanding father, who responded by dubbing him (a little backhandedly, perhaps) “the peacemaker.” Living up to his reputation as such, Ben solicitously followed his father out to the rock garden one night, since the man was very drunk and likely to fall and hurt himself. “You're pathetic,” said Cheever, when his son sat beside him.

  For the next seven years or so, the two spoke only “in curt, telegraphic sentences” (as Ben put it), and for only one reason. After college Ben had found it necessary to cut his beard and get a job—a very ill-paying one, as it turned out, at the Rockland Journal News. Lynda's parents did their best to help the struggling youngsters—they paid some of the rent and finally bought them a house—so Lynda thought it only fair that the elder Cheevers do their part as well. Once a month, then, under considerable duress, Ben would visit Cedar Lane and spend a few minutes asking his father about his lumbago and so forth, while the latter dourly awaited the dun. “My dearly beloved son comes in the middle of dinner to ask for money,” Cheever wrote in the mid-seventies. “He has not come to the house in two years for any other reason. I can hear his wife say, ‘Go over and ask your father for some money’ … I wish he wouldn't always ask me for money. I wish I didn't know that he was ordered, commanded, to ask for money.”

  * Notwithstanding Cheever's occasional expressions of self-pity to the contrary.

  * Roth had written Cheever a tactful letter enumerating the pages he'd liked in Bullet Park, to which Cheever replied: “[M]any thanks for putting down the page numbers. I checked them all. I thought Portenoy [sic] great from page one straight through to the end.”

  * Though of course Cheever had a compulsion to discuss homosexuality—especially with psychiatrists—he tended to fudge the facts. He may have had an encounter in December 1968, but there's no evidence of this in his journal or elsewhere. But even if he were lying about such an episode, his total number of at least semi-verifiable homosexual encounters to that date would number more than “three”: one counts Fax, Walker Evans, Kentfield, Rorem, to name only the most obviously carnal, and bearing in mind his nebulous intimations about Brodkey Fred, and various chums of his youth.

  * Brayfield later read Cheever's published Journals, where he found himself described as “barefoot [with] a fan-shaped beard and fuzzy hair.” He found this “wide of the mark”: “I often wore sandals in those days, but never walked around barefoot; I had a full beard, but it was well-groomed and close … and my hair couldn't possibly be described as ‘fuzzy’”

  * As Ben noted in the Letters, “I am no longer on speaking terms with my former in-laws, but I must point out in their defense that they each used to smoke a package of Salems every day.”

  * On his return from Yellow Springs, Cheever promptly got to work on an early version of “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” in which the title character has an affair with the wife of J. P. Filler, scholarly author of the best-selling monograph, Shit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  {1969-1970}

  WHILE BEN WAS GROWING UP, one of his father's most vehement strictures was against masturbation: Never do it, he'd say; it's vanity, self-love, and it ruins you for women. Ben had heard this so many times that he was surprised to find, after his father's death, that the man had not only masturbated quite a lot himself, but recorded the matter almost as copiously. “Jerking off I wonder if I would sooner be between H[ope]'s legs or down N[ed]'s throat,” he wrote around the time of Ben's wedding, when his own marriage was especially stagnant. Cheever was known to make the point that his constitution required at least “two or three orgasms a week”—but where to find them? That indeed was the rub. Even Mrs. Zagreb wasn't putting out these days. She was happy to give him a drink and commiserate about his wife's frigidity—but still (as she reminded him), he was married, and that was that. “It's all your fault,” Cheever told his wife in so many words, mentioning their neighbor's newfound compunction. Every so often he announced to the Friday Club that he'd met a fascinating, attractive woman, and would canvass his cronies as to the advisability of leaving his wife. (Within a week or two, usually, he'd deny having ever considered such a thing: “Oh, nonsense! I couldn't think of leaving Mary …”) That autumn of 1969, his latest dream girl was Shana Alexander, the forty-four-year-old editor of McCall's, whom he'd met through his old friend Zinny.* “I seem, after three encounters, to have fallen in love with S[hana],” he wrote, though he cautioned himself not to get carried away: “I seem to consider the women I love to be my inventions and when they forget or change the parts I've written for them I am disconcerted and at times disinterested.” Alexander may or may not have conformed to Cheever's invention, but in any case she remembered him—vaguely—as “cute,” albeit in a decidedly nonsexual way (“a little nut-brown guy with twinkly eyes”). Probably those “three encounters” were the extent of it, more or less, but that was all Cheever needed to contrive an affair of sorts. Besides, the practical side of things tended to be overwhelming, to put it mildly. “I am a man, a free man,” he resolved in the spring of 1970, when Hope finally returned to town: “I will drive into New York, I will take a hotel room, I will screw H[ope], and take S[hana] to the big dancing party. Pow.” Cheever proceeded to make elaborate preparations: he packed “a brown suit for the seduction and a dark suit for the party,” made sure he had enough Seconal and Miltown, bolted a quick TV dinner, wrote a note to Mary, reserved a hotel room—all the while drinking, of course—until at last he lugged his bag out to the car and took off. “[I] observe that my vision is bad, my driving dangerous. … I turn back at the gas station and drive home. I destroy the note, cancel the hotel reservation, unpack my toothbrush and my pills, undress, and climb into bed. I sleep soundly.”

  Little wonder he preferred fantasy. Almost everything about his subsequent meeting with Hope, for example, was lovely—except certain aspects of the meeting itself. He got up that morning free of cafará and was able to ignore, serenely, his wife's “contemptuous and weary voice” while he downed “three heavy scoops” to brace himself for the train, where a woman sitting beside him “seem[ed] appalled and terrified by [his] presence and perhaps by the fumes of gin that must roll off [him].” As for Hope, she appears to have done her best as always, but Cheever couldn't entirely deceive himself about his own performance: “It is not as good as it was a year ago. I somehow—hooch and a head cold—can't get quite on the beam. … She laughs at my jokes and says that I look much better than I did. Stoned and with a runny nose, I don't see how this could be possible. We lunch and return to the room, but the kissing is halfhearted, and when I suggest a fuck she says gently that she somehow doesn't feel like it.” But it was worthwhile, perhaps, just to confide in his wife afterward (“I talk freely about H.”) and regale the Friday Club with yarns about Alan Pakula's being “after [him] with a pistol” and so forth. During Hope's divorce proceedings, however, it transpired that she was actually seeing a lot of Frank Sinatra. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Hope and Alan are getting a divorce but I seem, through some sleight of hand, to have ended up with Alan.”

  CHEEVER FITFULLY RESUMED WRITING FICTION, though he sensed he'd lost a degree of “keenness” and that his work-in-progress, “The Fourth Alarm,” was little more than an “anecdote.” Perhaps h
oping for reassurance to the contrary, he wrote Maxwell that he was “doubtful” about the story and didn't want to publish it under his name (“I don't want to return on these terms”); Maxwell took him at his word, and rejected it. With this in mind, one suspects, Cheever not only went on to publish the story under his name (in the April 1970 Esquire), but even gave it pride of place in his next collection, The World of Apples* Cheever's first story in two years had been somewhat inspired by the nude revue Oh! Calcutta!, which had recently opened Off Broadway; wondering what he'd do with his valuables (wallet, keys, watch) if asked to strip naked and appear onstage, Cheever proceeded to imagine a protagonist whose prosaic wife takes a role in a naked play, Ozymanides II. The man's favorite childhood movie had been a quaint tale about a horse-drawn fire engine that saves the city when other, more modernized engines fail, and he reflects on this while watching his wife simulate copulation in public: “Had nakedness—its thrill—annihilated her sense of nostalgia? … Should I stand up in the theatre and shout for her to return, return, return in the name of love, humor, and serenity?”

  The quirky little story is entertaining enough, but hardly the sort of thing to make Cheever's competition stop and take notice. And who were his competition? He wanted nothing less, ever, than to be considered in the same breath with Bellow, Updike, Roth, et al., and yet The New Yorker was rejecting his work, while running almost monthly stories by his hated epigone, Barthelme. Cheever claimed to be writing an elaborate parody—sometimes a story, sometimes a whole book (The Man Who Rented Garter Snakes)—that was “meant to demolish Barthelme,” though in fact he wasn't writing much at all. While wooing (as it were) Shana Alexander, he'd promised to contribute something to McCall's titled “A Pure and Beautiful Story”—the genesis of what would become, very gradually, “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger.” “I am disappointed in Artemis,” he noted, after several months of work. “It lacks density and enthusiasm and my search for another method has not been successfully completed. Keep trying.”