Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Finally, in November, largely at Cheever's behest, the Romanian writer Petru Popescu arrived—a man who lived, or so Cheever delighted in saying, on “Julius Fuck Street” in Bucharest (actually Fucik Street). The two had met three years before, in Egypt, on a plane from Cairo to Luxor. Popescu was wearing a “drab commie suit,” and Cheever—very drunk, of course, but farsighted too—paused in the aisle and gazed at him owlishly “Yevgeny!” he said at last. “How are you?” Popescu replied, “I am not Yevgeny Yevtushenko, although you are John Cheever.” The latter, underestimating his popularity in the Soviet bloc, became alarmed: here at last was the secret agent sent to kidnap him for some mysterious transgression against the State. In fact, Popescu was far more anti-Soviet than Cheever. During a long night of drinking in Luxor, he spoke of his longing to defect, though he worried about the difficulty of reinventing himself, Nabokov-like, as a writer of English. Cheever listened sympathetically (“I've rarely seen an individual who was more delicate and more respectful of other people,” said Popescu), and later arranged for the young man to come to Iowa under the auspices of the university's International Writing Program. Popescu made the most of it—smoking pot with students, drinking with Cheever, generally relishing “all the experiences of the West”—and was so impressed that he defected four years later and became a prolific American novelist.

  When Cheever went home for Thanksgiving, he was pardonably pleased with how well he, a dying man, had managed for months on his own. He took Federico and Rob Cowley to lunch with the Friday Club, and exuberantly held forth about the “earthly paradise” he'd found in the Midwest: The country was absolutely gorgeous, and he adored the students and faculty and vice versa. His wife agreed to visit him a week or two later, and Cheever did his best to be a good host. Leggett gave a dinner party for the Cheevers and other dignitaries, while Cheever himself arranged an elaborate, well-attended reception at the Triangle Club on campus: “Mary was a very handsome woman and he loved showing her off,” said Gurganus. “Nobody really knew why he was there and not at home.”

  “Again I have no idea of where the fault lies,” Cheever wrote after his wife's departure. “I have to ask for a goodbye kiss and that is fleeting.” Perhaps it had something to do with his drinking, which had gotten so bad that he could scarcely conceal it to any seemly degree. His young consort Elaine remembered that she was “looking at [her] watch” by then—that is, counting the hours until she could drive him to Cedar Rapids and put him on a plane. The witty, modest gentleman who'd chuckled at his two pairs of “wash pants” and deferred to the promptings of “Miss Moody” had all but vanished, replaced by a drunken bully whose main topic of conversation was his own unappreciated greatness. For Elaine it was bad enough having to bear the brunt of these rants alone, much less to observe his mortifying rudeness to others. One night he agreed to meet a group of Christian Scientists for dinner, before which he'd spent several hours getting drunk with Elaine. “Well! I've just finished spending the afternoon with Miss Moody and we had plenty to drink,” he greeted his mother's coreligionists in the lobby of the Iowa House. As Elaine recalled, “They were dumbfounded—and he was late! This was a big event for these people, and he just treated them like dirt.”

  Another subject Cheever pursued in his cups was his sexual prowess. “Mary says I'm impotent,” he'd rail, “but I'm not!” Whether he succeeded in proving as much is a mystery; in public, at any rate, he did his best to appear insatiable. In addition to her role as keeper, Elaine served as a prop for these performances. One of her most vivid memories is the time Cheever was visited by a poor graduate student who lived in nearby Amana and made a pilgrimage in a blizzard, with his wife, to speak with the great man. The young couple sat on one of the narrow beds in Cheever's room, while Elaine and Cheever sat on the other. “So while this guy was trying to talk with him and have a visit,” said Elaine, “John was trying to paw me and kiss me.” At last it came time for their visitors to depart—to hitchhike in the snow, that is, back to Amana. As they waited for the elevator, Elaine took Cheever aside and proposed to give them a lift, but he had other plans and adamantly vetoed the idea. A few days later (“he thought I was out of earshot”), Elaine heard Cheever tell the young man that he wished he'd given them a ride, but “Elaine had things to do.”

  Reading Cheever's journal, one would think that December had been an idyllic time for the two. “The last days,” he wrote. “I do not sleep alone at all. We [he and Elaine] embrace strenuously as if we could leave a fossilized impression on one another.” To the end, though, he couldn't make up his mind whom he preferred—Elaine or Allan—until the latter resolved the dilemma, for the time being, by pursuing other interests (“Alan [sic] … has vanished”). Elaine it was, then, who spent a final “sublime” night with Cheever, then drove him to the airport without, it seems, conspicuously checking her watch.

  They met for the last time a few years later, when Elaine attended one of Cheever's readings at Harvard. Afterward they walked across campus and then paused to say goodbye. The sober Cheever, at least, seemed quite capable of remembering how badly he'd behaved. “Elaine,” he said, “you really were very kind to me.”

  * Her name has been changed here.

  † ”One way I can find out if I like something I've done”—Cheever remarked during a 1969 interview—”is if I can tell it and it's all right. … So one day last summer I said, ‘Look, Ben, I've written a novel. Do you want to hear it?’ And Ben said, ‘Yuh.’ And so I went absolutely all the way through it from ‘Paint me a small railway station’ to ‘wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.’ “

  * Last name has been changed, though perhaps it's worth noting that Cheever almost invariably used this form of address: “Miss Moody.”

  † To give the most interesting example, J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, in which the author writes with pioneering frankness of his own homosexuality, as well as the discovery of his manly father's louche past. The book would serve as a model, among others, for Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark.

  *”Dear Ray,” Cheever wrote in 1977, “I'd be very happy to tell the Guggenheims how good I think you are and having driven with you to the liquor store with a flat tire … I'm happy to hear you're off the sauce.” Carver later dedicated a story to Cheever—a homage titled “The Train,” which picks up where “The Five-Forty-Eight” leaves off: “The woman was called Miss Dent, and earlier that evening she'd held a gun on a man.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  {1974}

  FOR A FEW DAYS Cheever mooned over Allan and sometimes Elaine, but what with Christmas and family and so forth, the whole Iowa episode seemed to fade into the mist like Brigadoon (“I remember no one from Iowa and so I think, alas, alas, no one remembers me”). As an irrepressible raconteur, however, Cheever couldn't help regaling his wife and children with tales of his legendary prowess, referring as often as possible to the young woman who wrote him such ardent love letters. Beyond a point, Mary seemed to take the whole performance amiss, and after a startling confrontation (“she hurled at me the fact that I am responsible for all her misery”), she pretty much stopped talking to him again. This had the usual lowering effect on Cheever's morale: “I am in a very bad or self-destructive routine,” he wrote in January 1974. “M[ary] leaves at seven, long before daybreak these days. I stir somewhat later, drink coffee barearse, get sauced and never approach this machine with the clear eye and the clear head that I need. … Work, discipline, self-respect.”

  The reason Mary had to leave so early was that she'd taken a job at the Rockland Country Day School in Nyack, a rather long drive across the bridge. One evening she mentioned that she had to rush off to rehearsal, explaining that they were giving a pantomime to raise money for the school: she was playing Cinderella, while the rest of the cast would appear in drag. Of these rehearsals Cheever noted, “I don't really want her to remain here—she wouldn't speak to me anyhow—but the pantomime sounds bizarre.” The more he thought about
it, the more troubling it seemed, and finally he couldn't resist driving all the way to Nyack (unknown to his wife) to attend an actual performance, which proved worse than his most ghastly imaginings. The headmaster (a man Mary considered attractive) came onstage wearing a wig, joined by a female science teacher dressed as a man: “They sang a duet about how you separate the men from the boys on Fire Island,” Cheever observed. “With a crowbar.” By the time Mary appeared for her wedding to Prince Charming (a young woman), Cheever had seen enough; when the stage preacher asked if anyone objected to the union, Cinderella's affronted real-life husband bolted to his feet. “Yes!” he bellowed, stalking up the aisle. “She's already married! To me!” The audience laughed it off, more or less, but Mary was embarrassed all the same.

  This was another episode that would someday give Cheever a pang of remorse (“I was a fool”), but at the time it only affirmed his indignant sense of alienation. “I will leave here with no regrets at all,” he wrote a few days later, having accepted a professorship at Boston University for the fall. “I will take nothing, not even my own books, not even my ikon. … I will pack my bag and walk out the door.” In conversation with the poet George Starbuck, head of the writing program at BU, Cheever had candidly mentioned that he'd almost drunk himself to death the previous spring—but all that, he said, was in the past. Meanwhile he told friends that his eventual departure was “a decent way of ending things” with Mary, and though he was privately worried about returning to the part of the earth where he felt most haunted, he liked the idea of being a full professor; besides, Federico would be in nearby Andover.

  Still, there were many months to endure until he packed that one small bag, and suddenly it became important again that, almost half a continent away, there were comely young people who cared about him (“Iowa is my life line, my kapok vest and why don't I use it”). Confessing with a great show of sheepishness that he wanted to go to Iowa for a dubious purpose, Cheever asked Caskie Stinnett of Travel & Leisure whether he'd finance the trip in exchange for an article about town and campus. Stinnett was happy to oblige (if a little “uncomfortable” over how “guilt-ridden” the poor man seemed), and thus Cheever returned to Iowa in early February “to celebrate Miss Moody's birthday,” which was actually a month later. Gurganus was then in New Orleans for Mardi Gras (“I rather wish this so”), but Elaine seemed flattered by the visit, albeit a bit on the wary side. As Cheever alleged in his journal—and told various friends and acquaintances, including his physician—she'd asked him to keep his clothes on during sex “so that if [he] dropped dead there would be no embarrassment.” As he wrote Weaver, “I have been fucking a twenty-two year old graduate student who wakes me in the middle of the night to ask: Are those your own teeth? … It's a long way to go for that sort of thing but I'll probably do it again.”

  When he returned to Ossining, however, it wasn't Elaine he had in mind while wrestling with the urge to write “I love you” a “hundred times, a thousand times”—though he realized that this was “aimed at the wrong customer”: “I write an advertisement for the New York Review of Books: ‘Revolting, elderly, alcoholic novelist desires meaningful relationship with 24-year old aristocratic North Carolinian with supple form and baroque biceps. Little gay experience but ready learner. Etc’ “ The Carolinian in question was Gurganus, of course, who'd come to dominate Cheever's thoughts to a disturbing degree—disturbing because it was all so hopeless. Or was it? Around Valentine's Day, Gurganus sent Cheever some of the better stories he'd written in workshop, including one titled “Minor Heroism” that Cheever had found so promising he'd even been willing to offer concrete editing suggestions (How about a little more of this? And perhaps a little less of that?). Cheever sent the story to Maxwell, and became almost unbearably excited when his old friend paid him a visit that Saturday (the first, perhaps, since his doleful rejection of “The Geometry of Love” in 1965): Maxwell thought the story was wonderful, but now it was up to Shawn—who, Maxwell cautioned, had “never taken a story about a homosexual.” That Monday, Cheever drank martinis and waited anxiously by the phone, dying to get the go-ahead to call Gurganus with good news; as it happened Maxwell had already called him. “Yeah, and I'm Mae West,” Gurganus remembered saying when Maxwell introduced himself. The latter, soft-spoken as ever, insisted he was indeed from The New Yorker and would very much like Mr. Gurganus's permission to publish “Minor Heroism.” “That was one of the nicest things I've ever participated in,” Cheever wrote Maxwell afterward; Gurganus would always consider it “the kindest thing anybody's ever done for me.”

  It came with a few strings, though, or so it seemed. A day or two later, Cheever wrote a playful love letter describing “the modesty of [his] demands”: “All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football. I once asked myself (while skating) if Allan and I became lovers would I have to give up scrub hockey?” As a matter of fact, Cheever had given up scrub hockey (if he'd ever properly picked it up) almost before Gurganus was born, but this was by way of pointing out, subtly, that any ideal chum of Cheever's would have to swing his hips less and whack a ball or a puck more. Gurganus was subtle, too, in letting Cheever know that he had other plans. “The closings of your letters disconcert me,” Cheever wrote. “We started off with love, and moved into respect, devotion and affection. … I suppose we'll go through sincerely, truly, and end up Dictated but unsigned.” Gurganus had no particular objection to signing off with love (especially after the “Minor Heroism” sale), as long as he let Cheever know that this was more of an agape type of love, since his erotic drives were decidedly occupied elsewhere. In his journal, Cheever brooded over the “string of lovely boys” Gurganus never failed to mention (“How dare he refuse me in favor of some dimwitted major in decorative arts”); meanwhile he asked Gurganus to consider whether such callow youths “appreciate the excellence of your character and the fineness of your mind.”

  The best Gurganus could do was insist that he loved Cheever—after a fashion. When the semester ended in May, he paid homage in Ossining, where Cheever was waiting for him at the train station (“like being met by Melville on the docks,” said Gurganus). Deeply moved, already tipsy, Cheever held his beloved's hand as he drove them to a restaurant, where he drank heavily over a long lunch and was glowing by the time they returned to his car. Their waitress was also leaving at the end of her shift, and Cheever rammed into the back of her car. “She got out and saw that there was no visible damage,” Gurganus remembered, “and she wagged her finger at him, knowing full well that he had all the power and she had none. It was an extremely embarrassing, painful thing, though he didn't seem embarrassed.”

  Apart from Cheever's drunkenness, snobbery, and age (almost fifteen years older than Gurganus's father), the young man had other qualms. Cheever, he sensed, longed to play Pygmalion—to introduce him to people who mattered, take him places, nurse his talent—but, as Gurganus put it, “I was much too vain to be Mrs. anybody, even Mrs. Cheever.” And finally, of course, he'd picked up on Cheever's hints about hockey and so on, the odd jaundiced look at his hips, and could well imagine what it would be like to wake up with such a man. “The only men I know who live together as lovers I cannot take seriously,” Cheever wrote two years later (while determinedly looking for a male lover). “It is one thing to tear off a merry piece behind the barn with the goatherd but one wouldn't, once your lump is blown, want to take it any further.”

  CHEEVER'S NEED TO RATIONALIZE his homosexual impulses—and explain them to the world, if possible, in some acceptable form—led to one of his most incoherent stories, “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear.” Almost three years earlier, he'd made a note in his journal about “the vast and sternly concealed abyss of unrequition in my relationships to my brother, my father and my friends.” The abyss that separated Cheever f
rom the “legislated world” seemed a reasonable premise for a story about the transcendence of one's secret fears, beginning with the image of a literal abyss: the continental shelf around Curaçao, a “submarine cliff” that drops thousands of feet into blackness—“a metaphor for something mysterious in [the narrator's] own nature.” What follows are five vignettes that are likely to strike even the most sympathetic reader as haphazard—and no wonder, since Cheever mostly patched them together out of various passages in his journal. The second vignette, a distasteful encounter between the narrator and his brother Eben, would later be used in Falconer. However, the vignette that mattered most in terms of Cheever's purpose—where he finally comes to the point, as it were—concerns a homosexual encounter between a traveling salesman and a hitchhiker, both eminently “normal” men under normal circumstances: “The ungainliness of two grown, drunken, naked men in one another's arms was manifest, but Estabrook felt that he looked onto some revelation of how lonely and unnatural man is and how bitter, deep, and well concealed are his disappointments.” The abyss resides in us all, then, and such means of bridging it are only seemly. The story ends with a coda in which a feisty old lady recovers an antique chamber pot from two thieves after a high-speed chase—the point being that people are capable of great things once their fears have been conquered, or something to that effect.

  There was no question of showing the story to The New Yorker, and it was possible that even Playboy might balk for once. Only two weeks before, however, as luck would have it, Gordon Lish at Esquire had offered “three thousand for anything, sight unseen;” for “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear” he was willing to pay twenty-five hundred, which Cheever was presumably happy to get. When he reread the story two years later, he found it “disjointed and not very good”—though he reversed himself in 1980, offering it to a publisher of expensive vanity editions, Stathis Orphanos. Then at the height of his fame, Cheever had decided the story succeeded, as few before it, in making homosexuality “understandable and valid in the realm of everyday life,” as he explained to a friend. The story was therefore “quite important” to him, and he was “delighted” to have it reprinted in so handsome an edition.*