Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Cheever gave two reasons for his creative funk: “1. I drink too much. 2. I've written too much. … When, walking in the woods these days, I am struck by an idea, a metaphor or a phrase it takes me several minutes to realize that I've already used it.” Actually, this was only half true: Cheever's gift (and curse) was an imagination that went on working no matter how drowned in alcohol; it was the follow-through that bored him nowadays. Tipsily oracular one night, he lectured Mary on the subject of artistic bouleversement (upheaval), and became excited in spite of himself as he began to consider the bouleversement of time, morals, and perhaps his own work. His mind “swelling like a cabbage in the rain,” Cheever remembered a convoluted story about some Wollaston neighbors—”a novel in fact”—which he'd tried writing when he was fifteen or so. One of his childhood girlfriends had been a descendant of the great Puritan William Bradford, though she was one of the “wrong” South Shore Bradfords (resembling Cheever in that respect). The girl's family had a sordid destiny: her mother was something of a shrew, and her father had taken up with a disreputable widow and sired a bastard son (years later, at summer camp, Fax warned Cheever not to be seen with the boy); meanwhile Mrs. Bradford had invested most of their modest fortune in four diamond rings, which her older daughter stole out of spite, hoping to hock them in Boston so she could abscond to Paris. At any rate, the fifty-eight-year-old Cheever was now eager to apply his thoughts about bouleversement to this childhood memory (changing the name Bradford to Cabot), though his enthusiasm waned as soon as he sat down to write: “Who cares about the wrong Cabots this morning. Not I … I cannot feel that the world will be any better for their story or any worse without it. I will make some notes.”

  That was in January 1971, shortly after finishing “Artemis;” months later, he was still poking away, though not entirely without result. For years now Cheever had wanted to make momentous changes in his work (“I want a new cadence, a new perspective, a new vocabulary”), and he found that his story about the Cabots lent itself to an experiment in “digression,” as he put it. One of the favorite novels of his youth had been Gide's The Counterfeiters (which of course Cheever always referred to, socially, as Les Faux-monnayeurs), what with its intriguing metafictional narrator accosting the reader with constant reflections—digressions—on his story and characters. Returning to Gide's novel some two years after he'd finished “The Jewels of the Cabots,” Cheever experienced an almost unsettling shock of recognition: “I was either influenced unconsciously by the Counterfeiters when I first read it or there is an extraordinary coincidence here. The ambiguity of Gide, if that is the word, seems to be what I've been driving at for years.” And it wasn't simply a matter of Gide's narrative approach, but also a particularly congenial theme, which Cheever expressed as follows: “[T]he sense that what we part from forcibly and with deep regret is what we love and know best and our departure is impetuous, visionary and dangerous.” Thus Olivier runs away from home in The Counterfeiters, and thus any number of Cheever's characters (Geneva Cabot, Moses and Coverly, Ezekiel Farragut, to name a few) say goodbye to their homes, their haunted pasts, in order to forge identities in the greater world, as Cheever himself had done.

  His hope was to “change key” in writing “The Jewels of the Cabots”—to take nonlinear narrative to another level, jarring the reader out of the dream world of conventional fiction—though he couldn't help wondering if his experiment had gone awry. “Footnotes might help,” he wrote, while revising the story in May; “help that is to express a loss of self-confidence.” In a desperate effort to push past his doubts and ennui, Cheever finished the story “aided by gin”—a measure he'd hitherto managed to avoid in his serious work (or so the evidence suggests)—and when the thing was done, he scarcely knew what to make of it. “I will give the Cabots to Bill [Maxwell] and his enthusiasm will be boundless,” he fancied. “He will drive over here from Yorktown and embrace me, etc.” It wasn't to be. According to Cheever, Maxwell replied, “I'm happy to have been born in the same century as you, but as God is my witness this is not a story.” In any case, he rejected it.

  Not for the first time, one regrets Maxwell's conservatism (not to say his lack of sympathy toward an old friend in dire need of encouragement). At the very least, “The Jewels of the Cabots” is a fascinating failure, and perhaps an essential step toward the sort of reinvention that would enable Cheever (once sober) to proceed with Falconer. The story's persistent digressiveness may seem, at times, an almost boorish distraction from its titular subject, but in fact the Cabots are almost beside the point—little more than a means of piquing the narrator's memory in a contrapuntal manner. Early in the story, for example, the narrator recalls Mrs. Cabot's yearly diatribes at St. Botolphs Academy on the evils of drink and tobacco, which remind him (at great length) of his own mother's provincial intolerance. “Miss Peacock's has changed,” she “sadly” remarks of her granddaughter's school. When her son fails to grasp her meaning, the woman explains, “They're letting in Jews”:

  “Can we change the subject?” I asked.

  “I don't see why,” she said. “You brought it up.”

  “My wife is Jewish, Mother,” I said. My wife was in the kitchen.

  “That is not possible,” my mother said. “Her father is Italian.”

  “Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.”

  “Well,” Mother said, “I come from old Massachusetts stock and I'm not ashamed of it although I don't like being called a Yankee.”

  “There's a difference.”

  “Your father said that the only good Jew was a dead Jew although I did think Justice Brandeis charming.”

  “I think it's going to rain,” I said. It was one of our staple conversational switch-offs, used to express anger, hunger, love, and the fear of death.

  And hence the point of Cheever's digressiveness, which reflects the very nature of things in St. Botolphs—a place where the nastiness of life (whether embodied by genteel anti-Semitism, or more blatantly by Uncle Peepee Marshmallow and Doris the male prostitute) is swept under a rug of digressive propriety (“Feel that refreshing breeze”). Consequently the narrator himself, a product of that milieu, can't help shying away from unpleasant facts. “Why would I sooner describe church bells and flocks of swallows?” he remarks, remembering a time in Rome when he overheard an unseen woman railing at a man, “You're a God-damned fucked-up no-good insane piece of shit. …” Considering this—the sad case of the Cabots, St. Botolphs, the world at large—the narrator wishes he could express some heartening truth, as opposed to the merely sordid “facts”: “My real work these days is to write an edition of The New York Times that will bring gladness to the hearts of men.” At the same time he chides his own evasiveness as “puerile, a sort of greeting-card mentality”—and he does manage, finally, to confess the unpleasant “facts” about the Cabots: namely, that Geneva stole her mother's diamonds and fled to Egypt, whereupon Mrs. Cabot poisoned the girl's father. But we also learn that Geneva's escape—however tragic in other respects—has at least resulted in her own happiness. In a brief dénouement, the narrator visits her many years later in Luxor and finds her fat, happy, and married to a nobleman. And so the story ends: “On the last day I swam in the Nile—overhand—and they drove me to the airport, where I kissed Geneva—and the Cabots—goodbye.”

  The valedictory note is apt. In Falconer, Cheever would attain the kind of synthesis hinted at in “The Jewels of the Cabots”: he would describe the squalor of prison, a living hell, without any trace of squeamishness, and yet ultimately manage to transcend the mere “facts” and bring “gladness to the hearts of men” (“Rejoice, he thought, rejoice”). Until then, however, he was pretty much done as a writer, and never again would he complete another ambitious, first-rate short story.* “The Jewels of the Cabots” appeared in Playboy, naturally, and was included in both the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories for 1973. Reviewing the latter for the Times, Anatole Broyard reckoned that Cheever
had cast “a very wide net, but it may be too heavy for the craft”—a fair point. Despite its relative lack of focus, though, the story remains an impressive achievement, especially considering what a wreck the author was when he wrote it. And it's poignant to consider, too, that he persevered largely in the hope of winning back the approval of Maxwell and The New Yorker; that failure in particular seemed to break his spirit to some extent, at least as a short-story writer. “My friendship with The New Yorker seems over,” he reported after the “Cabots” rejection. “Playboy seems to be all that is left, alas.” Somewhere in the abstract, though, he knew he'd eventually prevail over his detractors. As he noted in his journal that following spring, “I will write a story beginning: Noone reads the fiction in the New Yorker anymore.”

  “I DIDN'T GO TO SING SING to gather material any more than I got married and had children to gather material,” Cheever would remark, post-Falconer, when asked about the two years he spent teaching inmates at Sing Sing. In a way, this is true. When he first volunteered in the summer of 1971, he was just finishing “The Jewels of the Cabots” and had little idea what to write next. With no meaningful work to do, no outlet for his imagination, he was liable to go mad. Indeed, the process seemed well on its way. Often alone and drinking all day, Cheever found that his legitimate anxieties about life—money woes, marriage, health, work—had a way of inflating into rampant paranoia, until by nightfall he'd drunkenly imagine that snakes or stray dogs or burglars (doing poor bobwhite imitations) were about to infiltrate his house. Sometimes he slept with a shotgun at his side. One night Ben dropped by, thinking his parents were away: “I was in the dining room when my father appeared at the top of the stairs. He was bare-assed and had the shotgun clutched in both hands. I don't believe it was loaded. He invited me to stay for a drink, but I declined.”

  Getting out of the house, then, was a good idea, but it also seems fair to say that Cheever went to Sing Sing in the hope of finding new material. He felt as though he'd “exhausted his old landscapes.” The previous year, for instance, while walking along Union Avenue in Saratoga, he'd seen “exactly twenty-seven details that [he] had used in stories—a wooden tower, old parimutuel tickets, a three legged dog, an iron deer, a dying elm, etc.” If anything it was worse with respect to New York, Rome, greater Boston, and the suburbs. Years later (a few months after finishing Falconer), Cheever would speak of the “stamina and courage” that Chekhov had shown in attempting to “vary his magic,” late in his career, by traveling thousands of miles to the penal colony in Sakhalin. Cheever could achieve much the same thing without leaving town, and doubtless something of the sort came to mind when the Sing Sing chaplain, George Kandle, approached him that spring after a reading. There were some two thousand inmates, said Kandle, and only six instructors. “Tomorrow I go to Sing-Sing to talk with the warden about giving a course in the short story to convicted drug-pushers, etc.,” Cheever wrote Ben. “If you don't hear from me you'll know what happened. Clang.”

  Thirty or so curious felons showed up for the first class, where Cheever explained that writing was an exercise “in making sense of one's life by putting down one's experiences on a piece of paper.” A Black Panther with one tooth in his head responded by writing and reciting a long, caustic manifesto against white society. “I find the place depressing,” Cheever reflected, “not for sinister reasons, but because of boredom.” Most of his students agreed, and soon he was down to a total of six. Since even these diehards had almost never cracked a book, Cheever decided to donate the Boyers’ set of Harvard Classics to the prison, which proved a more intricate business than he'd expected. When he and Federico carted the boxes into the processing room, a guard detained them for half an hour until the gift could be properly inspected. At first Cheever was haughty (Now see here, my good man), then furious when the guard refused to let him retrieve some cigarettes from his car: he demanded to see the warden, the education director, someone in authority, by God, while his son begged him not to make a scene. “I think there was a level of incredulity about whether in fact the inmates were going to gain a lot from Charles Eliot's bookshelf,” said Federico, though it appears Cheever was able to coax a few of them into reading (or at least listening to) the odd passage. Gleefully he reported that one of his “murderers, bank robbers, [and] drug-pushers” had exclaimed, “Oh what a cool motherfucker was that Machiavelli.”

  Even if Sing Sing hadn't resulted in Falconer, it would have served to replenish Cheever's fund of anecdotes. “I had hoped to do something like Camus,” he wrote Gottlieb after that first year, “but the raw material—misery and death—is disconcertingly farcical.” Three students in particular seemed to endear themselves to Cheever, and each was colorful in his own way. A Puerto Rican named Stacy had blown a man's head off with a Luger, though like most inmates he claimed to be innocent (“It went off by accident”); the real reason they'd locked him up, he said, was the power he wielded as “the biggest pimp in New York.” One of his notable compositions was about a family man who ends up raping a teenage boy, and sometimes he'd get a sudden donnée and drop it in the mail to Cheever (“Stacy writes a letter in which he describes threatening to break a whore's legs backwards, that sage and gentle man”). Stacy and his wife, a Jewish prostitute, had sired two sons who lived in a local orphanage, and one day Cheever took them out for lunch and bowling. Another student—easily his most talented—was a black man named David, whose most memorable work in Cheever's class was something called “The Pit-Wig Papers,” about a man who develops Afro wigs for armpits; David also wrote about a woman who got a sexual charge out of being pelted with tangerines.*

  By far Cheever's most abiding relationship was with Donald Lang—a pale, emaciated white man and “serious loser” (Federico) who'd spent half of his thirty-one years behind bars for armed robbery. At Sing Sing, Lang had been working as a clerk for Reverend Kandle, who thought Cheever's class would go nicely with a correspondence course Lang was taking in rhetoric and composition. As Lang saw it, a proper man of letters was someone like Hemingway; he didn't know what to make of this runty guy with the faggoty accent who said things like One expects (“I thought, ‘One what … ?’ “). Lang pegged his teacher as a showoff, a phony who came to Sing Sing because it gave him something to chat about at cocktail parties. Cheever, for his part, thought Lang was insane: “He repeats himself, repeats his name and is deeply suspicious,” he wrote in his journal. “I give him two magazines and he asks darkly: what is your motive.” Even during class Lang was sometimes rabidly hostile (“Donald mentions an undercover faggot and I jump in my seat”), until Cheever earned a measure of respect during the Attica uprising in September. As at Attica, the majority of inmates at Sing Sing were black, and prison officials felt certain they'd riot, too, if given half a chance to organize. “You'd make a great hostage,” Cheever's students observed, while Lang put the matter more bluntly: “I wonder where a little shit like you gets the balls to come in here.” But Cheever remained unperturbed—”I don't think anybody will hurt me, Lang”—and went on teaching, regardless of the danger. “You had to admire him for that,” said Lang, who would learn over time just how much Cheever identified with prisoners. “[I]f the cons and I were lined up against a guard,” Cheever told an interviewer, “I was all with the cons.”

  Once he had their trust, he was careful not to lose it. Caskie Stinnett, editor of Travel & Leisure, solicited a piece on what it's like for prisoners, who, after all, enjoy little in the way of travel if not leisure, but Cheever (who found the idea “interesting” and certainly needed the money) declined: “He explained that his acceptance by the inmates was an extremely sensitive thing,” Stinnett recalled, “and that it could be easily derailed.” And meanwhile, of course, he was hoarding his material for a higher purpose. Almost every set piece in Falconer—almost every detail—appears somewhere in Cheever's journal entries about Sing Sing, based on information he'd extracted from inmates: a robbery gone awry, for instance, when the victim, chain
ed to his refrigerator, had dragged the thing out of the kitchen and down the hall to the nearest telephone; or the way Stacy went to the infirmary each morning to get his methadone, and was almost beaten to death by “assholes” (guards) when he caused a ruckus in the midst of withdrawal; or the way convicts were photographed for loved ones standing next to a Christmas tree. Nobody, however, was grilled as relentlessly as Lang, who was grateful for Cheever's help in getting him paroled that December. Lang gave Cheever nice details about, say, the cats in the mess hall, one of which was clubbed by an asshole on the “goon squad” named Tiny, who organized beatings of difficult inmates (“dead by natural causes”). Lang also described an elaborate plan of escape he'd worked out as chaplain's clerk, whereby he'd disguise himself in a surplice and board the helicopter of a visiting ecclesiastic. Most fascinating to Cheever were Lang's stories about the casual homosexuality of prison life. Movie night, for example, was an excuse for mass blow jobs: “As soon as the lights went down [Cheever wrote] so too did Larry and Petey and Harry and Georgie and a real freak who called himself Margot. 20th Century Fox presents was wasted on us and even with that loud music they play for the credits you could hear slurping noises. Cocksucking is very noisy. … [One guy] stood right up and said, Hey men I just came seven times. Everybody clapped.”