Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Lang was far from imperceptive, and soon figured out that Cheever needed him at least as badly as vice versa. Cheever often insisted on greeting Lang with a bone-cracking hug (“It took time to get used to that”)—the sort of physical contact he'd always craved but was too sheepish, now more than ever, to seek among his family. Lang got the rest of the picture, too: though Cheever had a wide circle of acquaintances, he didn't seem to have a really “tight friend” in the world—certainly no one with whom he could relax, as with Lang, and display his profound disdain for so-called decent society. “Once you got to know him,” said Lang, “he had no façade at all. If he felt like diving into a pond, he just did it.” He also accompanied Lang to such places as the Orchid Lounge, where they'd sit for hours chatting with Lang's girlfriend, Peaches, whom Cheever described as “a very nubile, 17 year old black … very ethnic and very funny and refreshing.” Lang's multi-faceted love life, in fact, was a source of endless fascination to Cheever. Before he'd gone to Sing Sing, Lang had dated a prostitute named Kathy who once “took on the Yankee ballteam”: “There ain't a decent fuck in that ball team,” she'd allegedly remarked, “and Mickey Mantle is the dirtiest, most disgusting man I ever knew.” Lang's own sexual appetites were strange and unappeasable: whenever he got sick, he said, he'd go to bed and “beat [his] meat” until he couldn't ejaculate anymore, though he went right on beating it (“feels great, but nothing comes out the end”).

  In the course of one such conversation, Lang suddenly asked Cheever if he had any “buddies.” Loath to seem utterly bereft, Cheever replied that Art Spear was his buddy. Lang was incredulous: “You two old guys are buddies?“ It transpired that Lang was thinking of a different kind of buddy—the kind of buddies Lang and Cheever became for a while, or so it seems. At one point Lang fell into a stone quarry, drunk or high, and knocked out most of his teeth; Cheever helped buy him a set of dentures, then felt oddly heartsick when Lang came “bound[ing] up the stairs” to show off his new smile: “I feel bypassed,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “in fact I feel lonely. … I might write a story about an older man who fell in love with a [toothless] youth. … The young man returns with a beautiful smile … and the lover sees that a bridge of porcelain and plastic has ruined his happiness.” Be that as it may, he couldn't resist showing off the “comely” Lang to his agent, Candida Donadio, who was convinced the two were “emotionally involved;” and then, years later, Cheever confessed to a male lover that he'd had a “brief affair” with Lang—who, he added, “is now on drugs.”

  Most agree the drugs probably killed Lang. At any rate, he and Cheever gradually fell out of touch: Cheever got sober and began writing again, while Lang returned to the black community he'd gotten used to in prison. “Lang's car has been parked by the bank for a week,” Cheever observed in 1976, a few weeks after finishing Falconer. “He could be sick or dying or gone on drugs and I look for him. I find him getting soup for Peaches in a restaurant. … I seem to love him.” A few months later, Lang wrote a note thanking Cheever for helping him complete his five-year parole (he'd celebrated, said Cheever, “by getting pissed and falling down a flight of stone steps at the Soul #4 Bar and Grill”), and they continued to cross paths until the very end—or rather Cheever's end. Lang's came a few years later: one person said he collapsed while shoveling snow in front of the Star of Bethlehem Baptist Church, but John Dirks thinks he was found dead in his squalid little room on Spring Street. “He just burned himself out,” said Dirks, though he added that Lang had stayed out of prison, as far as anyone knew.

  * Susan had begun working as a reporter for the Tarrytown Daily News.

  *”Cabots” is the last story in The Stories of John Cheever. Though Cheever published six more stories (not including novel excerpts) in his lifetime, Gottlieb saw fit to exclude three of the four preceding the 1978 Stories, and almost certainly would have excluded the last two—very weak—stories of Cheever's career in the event of a posthumous volume.

  * David got out of prison in 1972, resuming his considerable career as a writer and character actor. He wrote a play about prison life that was performed at the Public Theatre in New York, and later became a staff writer for The Cosby Show. More impressive still was his ten-year stint as one of the lovable denizens of Sesame Street.

  * The woman's name (given in the journal) is omitted here.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  {1972-1973}

  CHEEVER SEEMED PERMANENTLY IMPAIRED by alcohol. His face and extremities were swollen, his speech was slurred, and almost any kind of physical exertion made him dizzy to the point of fainting. Most ominous, perhaps, were the spells of “otherness” he began to experience in the spring of 1972: “With a hangover and a light fever I distinctly get the impression that I am in two places at once,” he wrote. “I am aware of my surroundings here—rain and the beech trees and [also] I smell the coal gas and see the furniture in the old house in Quincy Have I gone mad?” These frightening lapses continued, until Cheever was finally persuaded to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a local church. He found it “dreary”: “The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am sometimes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink. … I am introduced to the chairman, who responds by saying that we do not use last names.” For the next three years, whenever the subject of AA came up, he'd explain that he'd gone to a meeting where someone had blurted out, “Hey! There's John Cheever!”—though (as we see) he'd found it even more distasteful that he wasn't, in fact, allowed to utter that celebrated name. In any case, he decided AA wasn't for him, and besides: “I think detoxification would kill me dead.”

  He persevered with his writing after a fashion, but the best he could do were disparate little vignettes that he sometimes tried stringing together into stories. The first inkling of Falconer (“Sauced, I speculate on a homosexual romance in prison”) appeared in his journal that April, around the time he became troubled with “otherness,” which may explain why he'd failed to write anything further on the subject (except notes) almost eight months later: “Since I know so much about addiction and incarceration why can't I write about it? All I seem able to do is to howl: Let me out, let me out. What did I ever do to deserve this? I am both a prisoner and an addict.” Though he could no longer make his material cohere into good art, it continued to marinate somewhere in his brain, and occasionally he'd come out with some non sequitur that hinted at his obsession: “I think I'd be perfectly capable of killing my brother;” “I have no moral objection to homosexuality, it's just that I've never quite got the hang of the plumbing …” Meanwhile he told interviewers he was working on a “massive” novel (“You'll be able to lift it to the sound of outboard motors”), the progress of which was so painfully, painfully slow that he was determined to stop writing for good once it was done.

  With nothing but time on his hands, Cheever was tempted to accept an invitation from his friend Exley to give a reading that autumn at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—though he was far more wary about traveling than he'd been even a year before. “I breakfast on scotch and Librium,” he warned his host, “am having an unsavory love affair [Lang?], and suffer so from Agraphobia [sic] that it takes me a pint of liquor to get on the train.” Perhaps the deciding factor was sheer curiosity. After seven years of lively, candid correspondence, he and Exley had met in the flesh only once, and then briefly, when the latter received the Rosenthal Award at the 1969 Academy of Arts and Letters ceremony—this a direct result of Cheever's efforts. As chairman of the Committee on Grants for Literature that year, Cheever had proposed A Fan's Notes for the Rosenthal (given to “that literary work … which though it may not be a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement”) by way of killing two birds with one stone: (1) promoting the cause of a worthy novel written by a friend (of sorts), while (2) scuttling Donald Barthelme, whose collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts had hitherto been considered the favorite. “[A]fter h
is last story in The New Yorker I cannot take [Barthelme] seriously,” Cheever wrote his fellow committee members. “This leaves me with Exley.” The poet Phyllis McGinley fired back that to eliminate Barthelme “on the strength of one failed story” seemed “captious;” besides, she “didn't find Exley up to his reviews.” Lest he appear to rule by fiat, Cheever diplomatically circulated a ballot including the names Exley, Malcolm Braly, and Richard Brautigan (but not Barthelme).

  Even Exley—whose name is virtually synonymous with alcoholism—was impressed by Cheever's drinking. As he recalled, “No sooner were we on the highway [from the Cedar Rapids airport] that John reached into his raincoat pocket, pulled out a beige plastic pint flask containing gin, invited us to have a belt, we declined, John took a healthy swig and returned the flask to his pocket.” Exley showed his guest to a room at the Iowa House, then inquired whether it would be all right if a nice young man came to interview him for the campus newspaper; Cheever was happy to oblige. “I like Exley,” he said, when asked what writers he admired. Any others? “I like Exley.” Nobody else? “I like Exley.” So it went. Since Cheever had arrived a few days early, he and Exley filled the interval with a pleasant routine. Each morning they'd meet at the downstairs cafeteria for “shaky cups of coffee,” then embark on an all-day round of campus saloons. “Hi Fred! … Hi Ex!” shop clerks yelled from their doors as the two writers shambled along. When Cheever expressed amazement at his friend's celebrity after only ten weeks in town, Exley “beamed modestly” rather than explain that the clerks were hoping to be introduced to Cheever, whose arrival had been widely trumpeted in the local press.

  Perhaps Exley should have mentioned as much, since Cheever's self-esteem was at a very low ebb, which meant a certain amount of compensatory haughtiness was almost inevitable. The writer Vance Bourjaily's wife, Tina, had gone to the trouble of birthing a lamb, feeding it only the best grass, assisting in its slaughter, and roasting it to perfection in a pastry crust for their distinguished guest—in return for which she received a bit of muttering condescension. As she remembered with lingering pique, “[Cheever] sat on his pompous ass at the dinner table saying ‘Imagine eating d'agneau en croute in Iowa!’ He probably never tasted a finer one unless he had eaten at the four star restaurant out in the wilderness of Southern France where they gave me the recipe.” Likewise, when Exley tried to talk him out of reading a story as lengthy as “Justina”—with worsening laryngitis yet—”John drew himself up to his full five-feet-five and in his insufferable tones proclaimed something like, ‘Ah've read “The Death of Justina” in Moscow, Leningrad, Stockholm [etc.] … and if it's good enough for those places it's damn well good enough for Iowa City.’” Sure enough, his voice began to fail around the middle of his reading at the Clapp Recital Hall (“Hoarseness is not, thank God, a symptom of Clapp,” he remarked), and afterward he complained to Exley about the size of the audience: “I thought you said Styron packed the place!” In the company of students, however (especially Exley's twenty-one-year-old girlfriend), Cheever was at his funny, self-effacing best, and in hindsight he viewed the visit as an almost unqualified triumph. “That was great fun although I do worry about all the tabs you picked up,” he wrote Exley. “We seem to have something basically in common, something more lambent, I hope, than hootch and cunt.”

  Indeed, Cheever had found Iowa City so “serene” that he considered teaching there the following year, when Bourjaily was planning to take a sabbatical. Jack Leggett, the workshop director, was all for it, and everything seemed in order except a few “imponderables,” as Cheever put it: “I don't know what to do about this house, [and] my marriage is in the annual dumps …” Mary, to be sure, was not keen on the idea of going to Iowa with her drunken husband, who moreover was likely to kill himself if allowed to go alone. The discussion escalated into mutual threats of divorce, until finally it was decided that they would all go their separate ways in the fall of 1973: Mary would remain in Ossining, while Cheever went to Iowa and Federico to boarding school (Andover). “Who cares?” Cheever said when friends wondered how he'd manage alone in the sticks. “Feed me to the pigs.”

  APART FROM THE USUAL DOMESTIC CRISES, nothing much happened to Cheever between his Iowa trip in November 1972 and the publication, in May, of The World of Apples, which coincided almost exactly with a long-overdue brush with death. One episode in the interim seems exemplary. That spring he was invited to give a reading in Provincetown, where he'd spent many happy days in his youth. “It's easier to get to Egypt,” he replied by postcard to Molly Cook, chairman of the Fine Arts Work Center, who replied that she and writer Roger Skillings would be happy to retrieve him in Ossining. What ensued, as Skillings wrote the poet Stanley Kunitz, was “a kind of nightmare.” Following directions provided by Cheever, they arrived at the house of a “large florid whitehaired man” who appeared to be in the process of repairing TV sets. “Who do you think I am?” he finally asked, having served them jelly jars of vodka. They told him. “Oh no,” he said, “I'm Johnny Curtains, Cheever lives up the road.” They found Cheever in high dudgeon and drunk, as he'd gulped a great deal of gin while waiting for them to arrive. He soon calmed down, however, and insisted on reading them a story from his advance copy of The World of Apples; with Mary and Federico in bemused attendance, Skillings lit a joint and settled back to listen. “I can tell it better than I can read it,” Cheever said after an “interminable” attempt to negotiate the text, and so he did while his wife devised a map to the Watergate Inn in Croton, where Cook and Skillings were to spend that Friday night.

  Cheever had been drunk yet dignified, lordly even, in his own home, but a very different Cheever began to emerge on the road to Provincetown. A “perfectly suited” Art Spear went along as a minder of sorts, though both pulled freely from flasks (gin in Cheever's, sherry in Spear's) and were plastered by the time they stopped for lunch at a diner in South Dartmouth, where Cheever indulged in a lot of Fitzgeraldian hazing of the waiter. That night, before the reading, Cook and Skillings had planned to take their guest to dinner at Ciro and Sal's Restaurant, but when the time came he was nowhere to be found. After a frantic search, Skillings spotted him wandering down Commercial Street: “[Cheever] gave me an immense long hug,” Skillings noted, “which gave me the willies because I thought he'd gone to sleep.” An elderly Hazel Hawthorne, one of the great benefactors of Cheever's youth, exuberantly greeted him at the restaurant—“Joey!”—and Cheever responded with a kind of bewildered bonhomie (“he barely knew her,” said Cook). The poet Mary Oliver was supposed to introduce Cheever at the Work Center, which was mobbed for the occasion, but before she could work her way up to the podium, Cheever had already begun: “[H]e read The Death of Justina very well considering,” Skillings related to Kunitz, “but his heart wasn't in it, and then everybody went over to the barn for a party where he kept sticking his tongue in my mouth and asking me how could I resist him.” Cheever explained that he'd “discovered homosexuality at Sing Sing” and wanted to give it a try, but Skillings resisted being pinned to the bed and finally persuaded him to desist. Art Spear was presumably elsewhere.

  It got worse. Spear caught a plane the next day, but Cheever gave no sign of leaving: nice people were providing drinks and food, he liked the scenery, and anyway why go home? “We were little drudges,” Cook recalled, “and he expected it. He would thank us politely, but not enthusiastically.” On Sunday, because of the blue laws, Skillings had gone round to friends’ houses borrowing Scotch for Cheever, and very early on Monday Cheever said that he needed a morning drink “for the first time in [his] life.” Guiding him to a liquor store, Skillings observed the visible effort on Cheever's part not to “bolt behind the store and take a belt.” The bottle was empty by noon, and meanwhile Cheever never stopped talking: “He talks mechanically and repeats himself,” said Skillings, “reminiscences without point or perspective …” Expecting dinner, Cheever reported once again that night to Molly Cook and Mary Oliver (both “grey with fatigue�
�), after which he resumed making passes at Skillings. “Why do you find me so repulsive?” he demanded. “I won't hurt you! I don't even know what the ritual is!” This went on until midnight, when Cook finally coaxed him back to his room and tucked him into bed. “I've lost all my friends,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “I'm lonely.”

  They got him a ride back to Ossining the next day. “In Province-town I see the beach, the dunes, the ocean,” he wrote in his journal. “How beautiful it is. I see an old friend [Hawthorne], smoke four joints and have a number of unsuitable erotic spasms. Why should people not respond to my caresses. I'll never know.”

  SUSAN CHEEVER APTLY DESCRIBED The World of Apples as “a slim collection of the ten stories [her father] had eked out during the 1960s, in between novels, traveling, and alcoholic interludes.” The title story might almost (but not quite) be ranked among Cheever's best, “The Fourth Alarm” and “The Jewels of the Cabots” are eminently readable and interesting, while the rest are divided between the relatively weak and the nearly embarrassing.* Two reviewers, Thomas R. Edwards in The New York Review of Books and Ronald De Feo in the National Review, summed up the volume with the same phrase—”rather tired”—nor were they alone in wondering at how little Cheever had to show for himself since his previous collection almost ten years before.