Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Once the manuscript was out of his hands, however, Cheever began to fret: “Around four I think that Falconer is a poor fantasy, that it will interest only a few cranks with corresponding fantasies.” He was even sensitive to the response of his typist, who failed to express a proper regard for the work at hand (“I am accustomed to tears and declarations of love”) when asking Cheever where to send the bill. His mood continued to darken as he awaited the publisher's verdict. He wrote Coates that he “[didn't] really give a shit for what anyone else thinks”—yet wrote in his journal of a recurrent daydream in which Gottlieb came to Ossining to kiss him on the mouth (or, conversely, called to say that he and Donadio “feel that there is a great deal of work to be done …”). After a long week of silence, Gottlieb's actual reaction was, if anything, an anticlimax. According to Cheever, the editor quipped that Falconer might be “too noble to sell,” and though he was moved to say the usual tactful things, too, on the whole he seemed neither overwhelmed nor terribly disappointed. “I want a friend, an enthusiast, a lover,” Cheever reflected, “and he is none of these.”

  By the end of the summer, Cheever's sense of omnipotence had decidedly waned. Charles McGrath had found nothing in Falconer that could be used as a New Yorker story, though he considered the novel “a miracle” and was nothing but generous in his note to Donadio: “It's not very often that we get a story from a novel, and I sometimes worry that when we do it must be because there's something wrong with the novel. In any case, there's not a thing wrong with The FALCONER [sic]; it's splendid, and I think it will be a great success.” It was one of the kindest rejections Cheever ever received, and would help cushion the blows that followed. Gordon Lish at Esquire (still riding high after publishing excerpts from Capote's notorious work-in-progress, Answered Prayers) returned a heavily blue-penciled manuscript to Cheever, then rejected the novel altogether. But the big money, of course, was in movies, and Cheever was particularly anxious to hear from Paramount via his new Hollywood agent, an associate of Dona-dio (“[he] screams a lot, says blah blah blah and seems to take it up the ass,” Cheever observed); he soon learned, however, that Paramount had not renewed its option on Falconer—this without any apparent negotiation on the part of Cheever's agents, who'd quarreled with each other and were no longer on speaking terms. “My discontents are quite simple,” Cheever wrote Donadio, whose days were numbered. “I am sixty-four years old, I have a seriously damaged heart and a nineteen year old son to support and to discover—entirely by chance—that no one is representing Falconer for film came as blow.” The final blow came in September, when Cheever was notified that the Book-of-the-Month Club had found the novel “shocking” and had decided to pass on it. At that point Cheever felt “robbed” all around, though he was disposed to be philosophical: “I am the sort of iconoclast,” he wrote Litvinov, “who will ridicule the establishment endlessly and expect to be seated at the head of the table. They sometimes protest.”

  In the meantime he'd been distracted by graver matters. On May 28, his brother had died of a massive heart attack (his third). Just a few weeks before, Fred had moved into “one of the dandy little apartments” of Wheeler Park, a subsidized housing development for the elderly in Scituate; then he'd paid a last visit to his brother, who knew immediately that Fred was near death. “This is a commonplace evening, a great improvement,” John noted afterward, while Fred was characteristically more effusive: “Just back from a fine visit with John who is in great shape,” he wrote his son. “He asked about you, as always, for he has a most sincere and proud interest in all the kids. Remember?—he took Nan [Fred's daughter Ann] to a short trip to Europe a few years ago and still talks about what a wonderful gal she was.” Fred had constantly mentioned Ann's trip to Majorca over the years, extravagantly proud of this rare intersection with his brother's family; he also mentioned the novel John had just finished, though he didn't refer to their parting exchange (as John often would): “Fred, I killed you in my novel.” “That's splendid, Joey. That's splendid.”

  John had been struck by a memory of his mother's decision to end her suffering by drinking herself to death (“[I] think of her as uncommonly clear and strong”) at almost the exact moment, he later learned, that Fred had died. “I cry,” he wrote in his journal.

  He seems, as most people I love have seemed, to be lost, to be suffering a loneliness more painful than anything experienced in life. I read the prayer book, but—other than that God will not be a stranger—the descriptions of life everlasting are not what I have in mind. The next day my sorrow seems visceral. … Susie and I talk about the family. I am inclined to make a legend of the Cheevers, and this can easily be done, but it seems idle to me. I will write a eulogy, including the fact that my brother wasted half his life. … We seem to have got the provincial eccentricities of New England, but we seem to have got them wrong.

  Philip Schultz said that his friendship with Cheever really began when the latter remembered his brother tenderly—”instead of (as usual) belligerently”—a few days after Fred's death. John spoke of the “communion” between them in the old days: how “protective and fatherly” Fred had been; the way he'd thrown gravel against John's window on Hudson Street. Schultz had been moved to tears, and felt as though he were crying for Cheever, too, who as usual found it difficult to express sorrow except with a kind of constrained cheerfulness.

  On June 3, however, when he attended Fred's funeral at the First Parish Church in Norwell, he became cheerful in earnest. Looking around the seventeenth-century church at the flowers (“Yes, yes, Louisa Hatch did the flowers”), the high, lighted windows, the mourners with their “sailboat tans, white hair and mannered wives,” Cheever gleefully realized that this was “the world into whose umbrella stands [his] brother used to piss”: “The text was Tillich, Cummings, and Eliot and not a tear was shed,” he wrote Gurganus. “It was splendid.” Nor was Cheever inclined to shed any more tears, confessing to himself that he didn't really miss Fred—for whom life had been “mysterious and thrilling,” after all, whereas “death was of no consequence”: “Some clinician would say that, while I part so easily with my brother, I will, for the rest of my life, seek in other men the love he gave to me.”

  A POSTSCRIPT OF SORTS: In the midst of mourning his brother—on June 1, to be exact—Cheever received a phone call around 4:00 a.m. “This is CBC,” the man said. “John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?” Cheever burst into tears. “Oh, was it personal?” the man asked. “He was,” Cheever sobbed, “a colleague.“

  One of the signs that Cheever was mellowing with age and sobriety was his ever more gracious, even tender, attitude toward Updike, especially after his rival's kindnesses in Boston. Cheever had recently nominated him to the Academy (“He is forty-three but one might put excellence above age”), and after Cheever received the tragic news that night, he couldn't get back to sleep. “He was a prince,” he wrote in his journal, and began drafting what appear to be formal remarks for the press: “I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition.” The eulogy proceeded (“John, quite alone in the field of aesthetics, remained shrewd,” etc.) until it began to get light outside and Cheever left off to feed the dogs. Finally he called his daughter at Newsweek and asked her to check the story with the CBC and the Boston and Ipswich police. Updike, it turned out, was home in bed. The call was a fraud.*

  For the rest of Cheever's life, he felt more and more easily reconciled to the fact that he and Updike were conjoined in the public imagination, for better or worse; he even rather enjoyed (“without presuming any familiarity”) the idea that they'd been “chosen to play out the roles of a father and son.” In 1977, Cheever attended the wedding of Updike's daughter Elizabeth and always made a point of dropping warm little notes to his colleague on the occasion of a new book, or to m
ake some deprecating comparison to his own work or reputation: “In yesterday's mail I was cordially invited to Notre Dame on the strength and mastery of the Maple stories,” he wrote Updike in 1979. “I think you don't know me well enough to know how vile I can be but in this case I was retiring and pious.” He also repeatedly told the press that Updike was the “most interesting writer of his generation”—the last three words being perhaps the crucial nuance, bringing us nicely back to Cheever's ambivalence, which never did quite fade. When Updike's novel Marry Me was published shortly before Falconer, Cheever all but prayed on his knees for its failure, and two years later he was furious to learn that “Updike's fourth-rate novel [The Coup]” had a larger first printing than his own Stories.

  * Also the name of the benefactress in Falconer who (“IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON PETER“) pays for the inmates to be photographed next to a Christmas tree.

  * Gioia went on to a distinguished literary career, becoming chairman of the NEA in 2002.

  * A quite reputable novelist (who'd been drunk that night, and who will remain nameless here) later confessed to making the call—or rather calls plural: he'd also phoned Updike's first wife and perhaps certain others.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  {1976-1977}

  SHORTLY AFTER FINISHING Falconer, Cheever arranged a summer vacation in Romania, courtesy of Travel & Leisure. He gave various reasons for this: his Romanian friend Petru Popescu, he said, was “such a striking example of egocentricity that I have wanted to check on his origins;” also, he had a lot of time on his hands before the publication of his novel in February 1977, and little appetite for writing in the meantime, or wrangling with editors over how to make Falconer “more readily appreciated by a larger readership.” But the main reason was simpler than all that, and applied just as well to the other travels Cheever would undertake in the months ahead: he was lonely. Days passed without his wife's saying a word to him, and when he tried to steal a kiss, she'd avert her cheek or fill her mouth with a cookie. “[W]atching Casablanca on TV I weep freely,” he wrote that summer. “My need for love, for tenderness, is painful and dangerous. … Oh God, I need it.” As for Romania, Popescu had assured him that he had a wide readership there, and thus he hoped to find “sexual engorgement” with an admirer of whatever gender.

  In that respect he was disappointed, though he could hardly fault the hospitality of the Romanian government. Provided with a chauffeured Mercedes and “an amiable guide who liked to play backgammon and swim,” Cheever was driven some two thousand miles, from Bucharest to Câmpulung to Suceava along the Russian border—a trek affording him plenty of material for a Travel & Leisure paean to the tree-shaded, two-lane highways of that folksy old country: “In Romania one drives mostly on such roads, and it is not only the past recaptured, it is the return to some serene human scale where one can admire the geraniums in farmhouse windows and wave to strangers.” But Cheever didn't really care about the geraniums, and even the picnics in the mountains, where one ate wild boar and listened to Gypsy music, were spoiled somewhat by vulgar tourists (“drunken Jews from New York”), to say nothing of his own indelible loneliness. “I see loving couples and would love to be among them,” he wrote. “I think, on waking, that I am deserving. And I worry for hours about the temptation of an erotic consummation with a man.” Worry though he might, the object was nowhere in sight, and he returned to Kennedy Airport in a foul humor: “[T]he Customs man threatened to confiscate some Moldavian Easter Eggs I had bought in a nunnery and I told him to shove them up his ass,” he wrote a friend. “Then I shouted at a perfect stranger: ‘If you had a dumb wife who knew you were coming in from Bucharest where do you suppose she'd be?’ Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my beloved Federico.”

  But apart from Federico, who left for Stanford that September, there were very few people whose company he much enjoyed anymore—certainly not that of his oldest, “fourth-rate” friends (“What am I doing among them”). There was Newhouse, of course, who kept a well-appointed office with a lovely old desk at which (mercifully, as Cheever would have it) he hadn't written a word of fiction in more than ten years; after one of their tedious lunches, the man settled himself in Cheever's wing chair and, solemnly puffing a pipe, urged his friend to invest in common stocks. “You are,” said Cheever, “a bore.” And what would such bores think, he often wondered, when Falconer (“a romance between a drug addict and a hustler in prison”) was actually published? Would it not confirm their worst suspicions? Watching Art Spear as he brooded over the backgammon board, Cheever realized that his boon companion “would be capable of having [him] burned at the stake.” He also began to suspect that certain members of his old circle had already discovered his secret. Mary Dirks, in particular, was apt to boast (or so it seemed to Cheever) of her ability to detect homosexuality in even the most unlikely people: “She is the provincial sorceress and why, one might ask, with her supernatural powers of divination, has she failed as an actress, a teacher, a lover, a cook and a housekeeper.” Mocking the poor woman as “the provincial sorceress” (or “muse of the provinces”) seemed to comfort Cheever, and he developed the theme at length in his journal. Her dinner parties, he wrote, were like “Stations of the Cross,” involving exhaustive innuendo about homosexuality and ending for the guests around three in the morning, when they retreated en masse to their toilets, “racked with diarrhea” from a rancid lobster mousse. “Some day I will get her down,” Cheever vowed.*

  “You are lonely, aren't you?” said Philip Schultz, who'd moved to New York the previous March and become one of Cheever's steadiest and most tolerable companions. (Cheever promptly related Schultz's remark to Dennis Coates—then stationed in Germany—by way of underlining the two men's common instincts on the subject.) Schultz was trying to live off his three-thousand-dollar grant, and Cheever identified with the struggling young poet: he, too, “hadn't a pot to piss in” when he'd moved to Hudson Street more than forty years ago, and yet he'd persevered and was determined to help Schultz do the same. The latter joined perennials such as Rudnik and the Lehmann-Haupts for holiday gatherings on Cedar Lane, and for a while he also came for regular Sunday brunches (Mary had a motherly impulse to feed him), after which he and Cheever would toss a football or take long bicycle rides. Zooming down a hill one day in November, Cheever hit a patch of gravel and “went cock-a-hoop over the handlebars,” badly gashing his forehead. Almost twenty-five years later, Schultz resumed a then-dormant poetry career by writing “The Eight-Mile Bike Ride,” an elegy for Cheever that recounted the “looping red trail eight miles long” that dribbled from Cheever's wound as he walked his bicycle home. Refusing to wash his face, much less see a doctor, Cheever was smeared with gore when his wife and daughter returned from a walk and rushed to comfort the stricken Schultz.

  The high point of the friendship came the following year (1977), when Viking accepted Schultz's first book of poems, Like Wings, on Cheever's recommendation. When given the news, Cheever actually jumped up and clicked his heels, and when Falconer and Like Wings were both nominated for National Book Awards, he seemed happier for Schultz than himself. After that, however, the two began to lose touch—or, as Schultz explained, “John became famous again.” In later years, on the rare occasions when they met, Schultz couldn't resist mocking Cheever's self-importance—asking, for example, the same question twice (“Saul wrote to you? … Saul wrote to you?”), whenever Cheever said something pompous. “I flare up at him, call him a horses ass,” Cheever noted in 1980—but then reminded himself, wistfully, that Schultz had been “a great friend when his friendship was needed.”

  A friendship perhaps better suited to Cheever's evolving persona was with the prominent art dealer Eugene Thaw and his wife, Clare, the latter of whom he'd met at an AA meeting a few months after Smithers. Clare had noticed Cheever previously (“a gaunt figure in a seersucker coat [with an] unhappy face”), and one night he sat beside her and sighed, “Oh this is so goddamned boring. Why don't we have a
cup of coffee?” Thus began a post-meeting ritual of repairing to the Thaws’ splendid Stanford White house in Scarborough, where Cheever would wittily complain about his awful marriage, or eavesdrop on Eugene's long-distance negotiations with, say, Norton Simon in Los Angeles. “Good niiight,” he'd drawl at the end of the evening, then turn to Eugene: “What is it now? One-point-six or one-point-two?” He also delighted in ridiculing the parvenuish Sleepy Hollow Country Club, whose golf course abutted the Thaws’ lawn. One night the three had dinner there, Cheever casting a radiant gaze on the panoply of madras and green; for weeks he mordantly reminisced about his “dinner at Sleepy.”

  Not that he was categorically averse to the flashy, nonaristocratic rich. For example, his old friendship with Mrs. Zagreb—whom he'd reverted to calling Sara in his journal—had become “quite humorous and innocent,” now that he was no longer an importunate drunk appearing at random intervals to use her pool and drink her liquor. That summer he was asked by Newsweek to make a few remarks on the occasion of the Bicentennial, and, while pondering the American experiment, he was moved to dash off a note to Sara to the effect that the “love of one's neighbor” was a virtue that seemed to flourish in our democracy: “I think you ought to know this since you are my neighbor.” Cheever's love, in these twilight years, became a cozier, quieter affair. Sunday mornings, after church, he'd buy fresh croissants or brioches at Say Cheese in Ossining Village, then have breakfast with Sara while watching the horse races on television. As he mused toward the end of his life, “I swim and chat with S[ara] and while this is not a complete engagement it seems to be one of those consolations that travelers settle for, indeed it is sometimes for these consolations that one travels.”