Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  * One can't help pointing out the eerie similarity between Buff's fate and that of “Shinglehouse” in Bullet Park, who, after being sucked under an express train, leaves naught but a “highly polished brown loafer lying on the cinders.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  {1975-1976}

  ALONG WITH HIS OTHER SORROWS, Cheever was pretty much broke. “I am so deeply in debt that even if the novel at hand is completed and successful I will remain poor,” he reflected in his journal. “I am close to tears; I mean this.” It got so bad that he even had to give up his coveted membership in the Century Club. A club official had written him an admonishing note in regard to (as Cheever put it) “[his] sordid deliquesence [sic] as a dues payer,” and Cheever drafted a reply accepting his fate as persona non grata, at least for the time being: “However I shall pay my back dues when I've finished the book at hand and—if the book succeeds—apply for re-admission.” Such matters reminded him, all over again, that Falconer would have to be a best seller to justify its advance and cover his debts, and never mind sending Federico to college and keeping his own body and soul together while trying to get his work done. Fortunately, at the darkest hour, Candida Donadio managed to negotiate a forty-thousand-dollar movie option from Paramount on the strength of a single published chapter in Playboy.

  It was now more imperative than ever that he finish Falconer, which remained at a rather formative stage after almost five years of occasional contemplation. “I still claim that my muse is around but there isn't much evidence,” he wrote, two months after Smithers. While he was looking in old journals for “situations that might be connected,” it occurred to Cheever to confect another hodgepodge (à la “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear”) that could be sold for ready cash. The result was “The Folding-Chair Set,” which Cheever explained to one befuddled reader as “the story of [his] life told by innuendo”—a pompous way of saying that it was a collage of random anecdotes about his family loosely sutured by the recurring phrase “we were the kind of people.” Among the material incorporated into the story (much of it also used in Falconer) was an account of the time his drunken father had pretended to ponder suicide while riding a roller coaster, as well as several derisive glimpses of his brother—portrayed as a boorish oaf who insists on summoning waiters by clapping his hands, who springs to his feet and doffs his Tyrolean hat when a band in Kitzbühel plays “Home on the Range” (which he mistakes for the Austrian national anthem): “I mention this only to illustrate the fact that we were the sort of people who endeavor to be versatile at every level,” the narrator dryly remarks.

  William Maxwell was planning to retire from The New Yorker at the beginning of 1976, and Cheever would later claim that “The Folding-Chair Set” had been meant as a “finger-exercise” to commemorate the occasion. It seems rather doubtful, however, that he intended any such tribute when he first submitted the story, or that Maxwell would have accepted it even if he had. Happily, Maxwell was out of the office for a few weeks, and so the story fell in the hands of one of his successors, the twenty-eight-year-old Charles (“Chip”) McGrath, who idolized Cheever and recognized his prose immediately despite the protective (or tongue-in-cheek) pseudonym he'd used for such a “trifling piece”: Mrs. Louisa Spingarn.* Though McGrath realized the story would have been rejected if it were by almost any other writer, at the time he and others were simply thrilled to have an actual submission from Cheever, to whom the magazine had been paying an annual “first-look” fee for many years without any real expectation of receiving further work.

  Cheever was almost giddily pleased that the young man had recognized his style and bought the story, though his pleasure turned to anxiety when he arrived on the nineteenth floor to meet McGrath for lunch. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded of the receptionist, who plainly didn't, causing Cheever to throw a “minor fit” until he spotted a mentally impaired messenger from the old regime: “There's a familiar face!” During lunch, McGrath was struck by how hard Cheever was trying to impress him: he'd just come from the New York Public Library, Cheever grandly announced, where he'd been conferring with the “eminent woman” in charge of looking after his papers. Afterward he wrote a friend, “I am pleased that my work, these days, makes [the magazine's editors] intensely uncomfortable”—noting that they'd deleted “a nasty crack at Borges and Barthelme” from what was, after all, his first New Yorker story in seven years. Nor was this altogether an idle boast. One of Maxwell's last acts as an editor was to reject a section from Falconer: “We are very grateful to John for letting us see this,” he wrote Donadio, “but the massacre of the cats was too much for us.”

  The improbable success of “The Folding-Chair Set,” whatever its merits, was a great boost to Cheever's morale: he felt as though he'd shaken off a curse, and was eager to make the most of his changing luck. In the old days, when his creative powers and work ethic had been at their best, he'd almost always made a point of getting on with his writing rather than dwelling on some passing triumph. “I must get back to the Cardinal if I have to work in declarative sentences,” he urged himself as soon as “The Folding-Chair Set” was behind him. The “Cardinal” was the late-middle section of Falconer, in which Jody miraculously escapes from prison via the Cardinal's helicopter—one of the first sequences Cheever wrote, and perhaps his favorite. When it was finished, he excitedly gathered his family around the fire and read it aloud (“They were all very pleased with it”). After that, rather to his amazement, the book began to fall into place, even the stray bits he cannibalized from old stories and journals—anything to keep his momentum going. Just to be working again made him so ecstatic that he deliberately rested on Fridays, lest he get so “high” with creative jubilance that he end up “brain[ing] Tom Glazer with a dinner-plate” at their lunches with the Friday Club.

  “UP THE RIVER to Yaddo for the first time in many years without the company of alcohol,” Cheever wrote at the outset of a long September stay. As luck would have it, Gurganus was working as special assistant to the president (or “the John Cheever job,” as some called it), and when Cheever arrived in his room at the Trask mansion, he found flowers and presents from his protégé; he couldn't help thinking, however, that if Gurganus really loved him he would have been waiting impatiently at the bus station in Albany. Despite such high expectations, Cheever seemed undismayed when Gurganus again refused (“kindly and politely”) to sleep with him: “I enjoy his company and would enjoy his skin,” Cheever mused, “but I miss neither.”

  With Gurganus, he paid his first visit in a long while to the ninety-year-old Elizabeth Ames, who appeared to be waiting for a train—what with her fur stole and tightly clasped handbag—in the parlor of her cottage, Pine Garde. Cheever greeted her with the usual obliging roar (“HELLO THERE, ELIZABETH!”), and she peered up at him with evident pleasure. “John! What a coincidence! Fancy meeting you here!” Evidently thinking it was some time in the distant past, she treated Cheever like the charming young man whom she'd first adopted as a surrogate son, while Gurganus was “the boy in white pants” whose name she could never quite place. As Cheever put it, “she decided that the people she loved and admired—many of them long dead—were alive and working in the mansion, the fools and the bores … were dead.” For a while she politely inquired about Carson McCullers and the like (“Oh, I don't think Carson's doing so well, Elizabeth …”), then, growing tired, she pointedly told her nurse to “put that call through” to her brother, who'd been dead since the Great War. “Well, John, this has been a coincidence,” she said, dismissing him. “If you're ever in Minneapolis again, do stop by.”

  Leaving Pine Garde, Cheever seemed all the more eager to attach himself to a younger generation. An abstract artist in her late twenties, Melissa Meyer, found that the only free seat at dinner was next to Cheever, the most dauntingly famous person in the room. Since the table was discussing quaint towns in the area, Meyer couldn't resist putting in, “Last year I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hort
ense.” Cheever was transported: “Oh, what a wonderful sentence! May I use it?” Thus endeared, Meyer was invited to join him for drinks at the Gideon Putnam Hotel, where a van-and-trucking convention was in progress. After an hour or two of giving her his sober, undivided attention, Cheever guided her back to the convention and slipped two metal signs (“for your studio”) under his jacket: “KENTUCKY“ and “POSITIVELY NO SMOKING IN VAN OR IN RESIDENCE.“ During the same visit, he befriended the poet Philip Schultz, in part because the young man had proved to have a “good wing” while tossing a football with Cheever. One night the two were having a manly chat about women while Gurganus, seated nearby, rolled his eyes and repeated the odd word with broad sarcasm. If Cheever noticed, he gave no sign.

  He was reunited with Schultz later that year in Boston, where Cheever had arranged to give a reading at the offices of the Harvard Advocate in order to “strike some sort of peace” with the city. “I must repair my farewell scenes there,” he wrote Laurens Schwartz; “and everything is going so splendidly here that I'm sure I'll be able to weather what I think to be a sinister, provincial and decadent part of the world.” To prove his point, he promptly paid a visit to Kenmore Square, where a bitter wind continued to blow amid the funeral parlors and embalming academy. “That place is asshole,” Cheever reiterated, but the rest of the trip was a lark. Schultz, then living in Cambridge, attended the Advocate reading and laughed in all the right places; then the two got in a taxi and struck up a conversation with the cabbie, who waived his fare once he learned that Cheever was in his car. As the latter reported: “ ‘Hot shit,’ [the cabbie] said, ‘Apples, Bullet Park, the Wapshots.’ I gave him a copy of the Brigadier. Everybody was laughing.” It got better the next day, when Schultz announced (“jumping up and down”) that he'd just won a grant for three thousand dollars. “This is just the beginning of many good things for you,” Cheever said with paternal pride, treating the poet to baked oysters and tournedos at Locke-Ober.

  Perhaps the most definitive act of reconciliation came after his lunch with Atlantic editor Robert Manning, who again solicited a story. Cheever wrote it in his head while leaving the restaurant, then typed it up in his hotel room: “I was hot,“ he said later. “When you're hot you can write anything—timetables, grocery lists, stories, anything.” “The President of the Argentine” is more than a timetable or grocery list, though somewhat less than a fully realized story; as a witty confession of the author's fall from grace, however, it serves as an interesting artifact. The piece opens with a quick parody of (and commentary on) old New Yorker fiction: “How like sandpipers were the children on the beach, she thought, as she stood by the rusty screen door of their rented house on Nantucket. Zap. Blam. Pow. Here endeth my stab at yesterday's fiction. No one's been reading it for forty years.” Instead, the reader is told of a desolate day when the narrator was almost arrested in Boston, while trying to put a hat on the president of the Argentine. By way of familial context, he also describes the alcoholic exploits of his eccentric old Yankee father—who once, for instance, drank all the sherry and pissed the decanter full. “[T]he piece is shapeless and self-indulgent,” one Atlantic editor wrote in a circulating memo, “as well as periodically tasteless;” “a lazy exercise,” wrote another, who thought it “boil[ed] down to whether we want Cheever in the magazine that badly. I, for one, don't need him.” Richard Todd, however, found the piece “funny and affecting,” and Michael Janeway agreed: “Also,” he pointed out, “it's in some ways meant for us as ‘a Boston story,’ from the bad Boston season of his life.” For that reason, primarily, the story was purchased for twelve hundred dollars, appearing in the April 1976 issue. “I prefer your books,” Schultz remarked. “The story is like your dinner conversation.”

  By then Cheever had pretty much forgotten the thing. Falconer was going so well that he'd treated himself to another vacation in late January, heading to Stanford for a reading while Federico (soon to graduate from Andover) toured the campus. Cheever's minder was Dana Gioia, a graduate student and lifelong fan*; in a curious coincidence, he'd been at Harvard the year before, when he'd arranged for Cheever to read at a “weekly literary table” for undergraduates. Unfortunately, the well-attended event coincided with Anne Sexton's suicide, and Cheever decided to stay home that night (as he might have done in any case). “Intoxicated by the news of Cheever's [Stanford] visit,” Gioia remembered, “I mentioned it to some undergraduates, but soon learned that none of them knew who he was. Undismayed, I decided I would show them and went off to the university bookstore only to discover that all but one of his books were out of print.”

  Cheever behaved, in the best possible sense, like a man who realized his books were out of print. “Absolutely perfect,” he declared, when Gioia showed him his “tiny concrete-block cubicle” at the Florence Moore dormitory (Federico was staying elsewhere with Andover friends). Cheever had nothing much to do until his reading, and each day Gioia would find him sitting alone in the common room, reading and smoking, happy to go for a walk or a drive or whatever else Gioia had in mind. Such were his radiant good spirits (“the joy of having been resurrected from the dead,” as Gioia put it) that freshmen in the dorm actually enjoyed having their meals with Cheever: “His conversation never excluded them,” said Gioia. “It was intelligent without being intellectual, informed but not pedantic. And he was very funny. After all, as he once said, ‘You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.’ “

  What little star-treatment Cheever might have expected was further precluded by the unexpected arrival of Saul Bellow, whose wife, Alexandra, was considering a position in the math department; Bellow's presence implied that he might be interested in a package deal, though Cheever intimated to Gioia that what Saul really wanted was to get away from his previous wife in Chicago. The two writers had rarely been further apart in stature: Cheever was virtually forgotten, whereas Bellow had just published Humboldt's Gift and would presently win the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. Also, Cheever could hardly have been more gracious and charming, while Bellow seemed to suffer whosoever had the temerity to approach him. “Literature is not a competitive sport,” he snapped (quoting a friend) when Gioia asked him what contemporary fiction writers he admired; having put the youth in his place, Bellow abruptly continued: “Wright Morris, J. F. Powers, and a man standing in this room … John Cheever.“ The latter was doubtless flattered, but hardly awed. As Bellow prepared to give an impromptu reading, Cheever conspicuously relinquished his front-row seat to an old lady; then, sitting on the floor, he whispered to Gioia, “I can hear Saul, but all I see are a shiny pair of reading glasses peeking over the microphones.”

  When it came time for Cheever's own reading, he was introduced by the head of the writing program, Richard Scowcroft, whose “elegiac tone” confirmed the general impression that Cheever was washed up. And yet he seemed to enjoy himself all the same. His duties at Stanford discharged, he flew to Los Angeles and spent a few days sitting around the Weavers’ heated pool, where the old friends took turns delivering mock eulogies of each other. He also had a pleasant lunch with Hope Lange: “That her voice may be shrill,” he wrote in his journal, “that her looks may be passing, that there is very little correspondence in our tastes are things I know and don't care about at all.” He could hardly wait to get home and tell family and friends all about it: the way they'd kicked off their shoes at the restaurant and played footsie under the table, their kiss beside the streetlight in Sherman Oaks, the possibility that she was coming east in the spring.

  THAT SPRING (1976), Cheever was so busy with Falconer that he could hardly bother to write letters, and what few he wrote tended to be on the same subject. “All writers suffer terribly from delusions of omnipotence and I am in the throes of this,” he wrote Litvinov, who'd since defected to Hove, England, near Brighton. “I feel, at the moment, that if I wanted to go to Hove I would simply have to stand on the sunny terrace, flap my arms and ascend. I would, of course, break my neck.” Standin
g on that sunny terrace with his daughter one day, Cheever happily announced, “He gets out. Farragut gets out.” The discovery that his fictional alter ego would soon be free—from prison, from addiction, from various kinds of fear—made Cheever himself feel, perhaps for the first time in his life, that everything was going to be absolutely all right:

  I think the work is successful and that I may be rich and famous. I claim not to care. I can always scythe my fields and walk in the streets. It is the strangeness of this excitement that I must examine. Why should it seem so strange to succeed? I do not mean pride or hubris. I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials.

  After finishing the novel on Good Friday, he went to Trinity Church in Ossining “to say [his] prayers,” and was “nearly run over by Donald Lang” as he departed. Somehow it seemed a good augury.