Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  • • •

  DISAPPOINTED IN ROMANIA, Cheever agreed to give readings that autumn at Bennington and Cornell with quite the same goal in mind: “I think in terms of the appearance of some lover who will undo me, engorge me and grant me a contentment I have nearly forgotten.” It occurred to him that “close to three years” had passed since he'd actually gone to bed with a willing partner (the occasional piece of quick, hired sex didn't count), and now it seemed that his best hope lay in finding a tractable protégé in some university English department. This involved a great deal of soul-searching, however: “I could not possibly exploit or debauch a young secretary,” he chided himself; “one cannot take this much of another man's life.” But it was, quite definitely now, a man he wanted, though he worried that, once he'd committed himself to that path, it would lead to his destruction. In the past this intuition had always dissuaded him from cultivating long-term homosexual affairs. As he'd reflected some twenty years before:

  What is involved is a relaxed acceptance of the bisexual nature of man and the realization of the fact that excesses of perverse love, unlike other forms of love, compounds perversion and spreads it all through the personality, for once you are absorbed in unnatural matters your conduct becomes unnatural, the lures you use to attract your prey are disfiguring, your attitude toward the most rudimentary and vital forms of organized society … become implacably scornful. It is a fine line between the admission of natural bisexuality and the excesses of perversion.

  And then, too, what would his family think? What, above all, of his beloved Federico, who Cheever often worried would be approached by the sort of predatory homosexual that Cheever (by his own lights) now considered becoming—what would Federico, having encountered such a person, think of his own father? Quite simply, Cheever could not succumb to his desires without abandoning certain of his fondest convictions; and so, in the end, he decided to abandon them. “I lie in the sun, nearly overwhelmed by the thought of the phantom lover who will destroy my life,” he wrote that October. “For an hour it seems that I must part from all of this; the trees, the clearness of the autumn light, even the old dog.” And yet he felt he had no choice (“this is a destiny”) but to pursue the “darkness in [his] heart” and find his “destroyer.”

  Such a person was not to be found at Bennington, though Cheever watched with furtive interest as a tall, dark youth went around the train station approaching the sort of seedy old men who linger on benches once the arriving passengers have dispersed. Cheever had been told to expect a woman, Melissa Fish, but at the last moment Peter Pochna (to whom Cheever had been described as a man “no longer young”) had gone instead; when Pochna approached the dreary codger nearest Cheever, the two finally met. Before his reading, Cheever had dinner with Bernard and Ann Malamud, the poet Stephen Sandy, and other students and literati, whom he regaled again and again with the train-station story (the would-be Cheevers becoming more numerous and decrepit with each telling). Later, he put in a brief appearance at a party in his honor, saw nothing he liked, and retired to his room at the Fruitrich guesthouse, where he drew himself a bath and turned on the TV: “I got into the tub and pretended that the room was full of people. It was full of voices. But I am tired of such loneliness.”

  That left Cornell, where Cheever had been the first in a distinguished roster of writers—Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Brodkey, and others—invited to perform at the Chekhov Festival. “For the master I'll come for bus fare and a roof over my head,” Cheever had replied, though his host, James McConkey, insisted he accept an airline ticket and the usual one-thousand-dollar honorarium. (Cheever typically donated his honorarium checks to the college literary magazine or some such institution.) At Cornell, however, his reception was even less auspicious than at Bennington: “I am met at the airport in Ithaca,” he noted, “not by a beautiful youth but by Professor and Mrs. McConkey!”

  Still, he looked forward to a packed auditorium at his reading, for which he'd gone to the trouble of writing a long meditation on Chekhov titled “The Melancholy of Distance.” As he reminded his audience, “I am, after all, one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov; but then I have been described as the Budd Schulberg of New England.” Cheever made light of the vogue among New Journalists and the like to claim that modern reality “outstrips the inventiveness of the imagination”: under Alexander III, he pointed out, there had been “bands of whooping Cossacks riding on the ghettos to murder men, women, children and infants”—and yet Chekhov had not been discouraged, even amid “the darkness of a censored press,” since, after all, his subject was the “deep giving and taking” between human beings of any historical moment. Cheever concluded with a splendid instance of Chekhovian obliquity from Uncle Vanya—the one time in this very personal, anecdotal lecture that he bothered to quote the master at all (evidently from memory)*: “The [final] scene is one of sadness and despair. Then Astrov goes to the map on the wall and exclaims: How hot it must be in Africa. … Here is a new and thrilling element brought to the universality of loneliness, here is Chekhov's mastery of the melancholy of distance. The line is written for an actor and it can be laughed or wept or dropped like a stone: its force remains unchanged. How hot, etc.”

  Cheever knew whereof he spoke, and once again he ended such an evening alone in his room: “I meet no destroyer,” he forlornly recorded; “I may never. … What I remember most vividly, most usefully is leaving the reception in my honor. I would like to pluck someone from the gathering for my pleasure but I will not, I cannot. … No liquor, no sex, no love, no friendship, nothing but a cigaret and The New York Times.” As it happened, the graduate student who was most admiring of Cheever's work (the only one, indeed, who knew much about him at all) was a married woman named Frederica Kaven, and hence the two were thrown together for much of the weekend. Cheever tried to be a lively companion, but when Kaven remarked how “funny” his stories were, she noticed a definite flicker of sadness in his eyes—as though he was thinking that people remembered him, if at all, as funny.

  Kaven, at any rate, was elected to drive him to the airport, where he was informed that his flight had been delayed because of engine trouble. “I'm taking the bus!” he cried in alarm. That left some three hours to kill. For a while they chatted over coffee at Kaven's house, and finally Cheever was standing in a tavern across from the bus station, trying (unsuccessfully) to get a sandwich; Kaven never forgot how a dusty ray of sunlight seemed to be pointing at Cheever—a frail, tweedy figure among the afternoon drinkers (“a person who never had a chance,” she thought for some reason). After he kissed her goodbye on the cheek, Kaven paused on her way to the parking lot: “I'll be looking for your next book!” she called back to him. “What's it called again … ?” “Falconer!” he shouted vigorously.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of 1977, Cheever predicted (with greater accuracy than he might have imagined) that the new year would prove to have “some true newness to it.” There was Falconer, of course, as well as a week at the University of Utah in late January—a prospect that struck Cheever as “deliciously promising”: as he'd been reminded over the past few months, illustrious writers are hardly novelties at prestigious eastern colleges, but out in the desert of Utah he seemed more likely to find a student aching for his patronage. And yet, again, he was almost startled by his own hideous excitement: “Is self-destruction my destiny, am I perverse? Will I read into a cruel or a bestial face the promise of romantic love? Can this be my death?”

  The head of the writing program at Utah, Dave Smith, had encouraged the more promising students to submit work in advance of Cheever's visit, since their famous guest had agreed to spend a few hours a day in individual conferences. Perhaps the best writer in the program, however—a Ph.D. candidate in his early thirties named Max Zimmer—wasn't interested: he'd satisfied his curiosity by reading a couple of Cheever's stories and hadn't found them congenial; besides, he'd begun work on a vast, Pynchonesque novel about the West that ha
d recently caught the eye of E. L. Doctorow, no less, so he figured he didn't need Cheever's help. But Smith insisted he arrange a conference, and finally took it upon himself to submit one of Zimmer's stories, “Utah Died for Your Sins,” which Cheever did, in fact, find “very exciting.” Thus Zimmer was presented with a fait accompli: “Cheever's getting out of a seminar at two o'clock,” said Smith, “and I want you to be there to meet him.” Reluctantly he complied, appearing before Cheever at the appointed hour—a shaggy, bespectacled young man wearing cowboy boots and accompanied by a small Airedale on a leash. But what enchanted Cheever most, perhaps, was that Zimmer “had none of the attributes of a sexual irregular;” what he'd always wanted, after all—as Gurganus put it—was “somebody who was literary, intelligent, attractive and manly, but gay on a technicality in a way.”

  Arguably Zimmer was not gay in even a technical sense—but then, as Dave Smith pointed out, “there was some difficulty in knowing who the real Max was.” Already he'd gone through a number of curious changes in his life. His parents were devout Mormons who'd emigrated from Switzerland when Zimmer was a boy. At age nineteen, he'd gone back to Europe as a missionary and discovered a love of writing while editing (irreverently) the mission's newsletter. He soon returned to Utah, however, having been excommunicated for a sexual indiscretion—a fact he was compelled to confess (“gruesome”) to his congregation back home. Then, a year or so later, he endured the ordeal of reinstatement so he could marry a Mormon woman and, not incidentally, win back the affection of his father and namesake, to whom “nothing mattered more than [having] good Mormon kids.” For a while Zimmer was able to play that role, until almost the day of his college graduation with a degree in engineering: “The sixties were breaking open,” he remembered, “and engineers were getting jobs building toasters for Motorola in Arizona, stuff like that, and that's not my life.” So once again he turned his life upside down: “I left the church, divorced a perfectly good woman, and went full-hog into English and writing.”

  The story that Cheever had claimed to find exciting, “Utah Died for Your Sins,” would later be included in The Pushcart Prize III: Best of the Small Presses, but otherwise seems hardly in line with Cheever's tastes, given that it is frankly experimental and lacks what Cheever was apt to call velocity. It opens with a disquisition on a deer-killing method that involves embedding a razor in a block of salt, so that the animal obliviously bleeds to death without injury to its internal organs. Next is a long description of a man customizing a car, then using the car to romance a woman until the affair goes vaguely wrong. At last we encounter a character named Seymour Utah, who may or may not be the bereft mechanic: Utah has thief-proofed his motorcycle helmet by sticking razors in the padding, but apparently forgets and claps the helmet on his own head—whereupon, like a deer or a Christ figure, he slowly bleeds to death from this crown of thorns while riding into the desert. What does it mean? “It is a story about a man who allies the mysteriousness of women to the mysteries of machinery,” Cheever conjectured.

  With a momentous air, Cheever invited the author back to his room at the Lake City Motel, an uncommonly grungy place near campus. (Dave Smith had offered to reserve him a room at one of the better hotels in town, three or four miles away, but Cheever wanted to be within walking distance and seemed to enjoy complaining, wittily, about the lack of basic amenities such as a telephone or a bath plug.) Once they were situated—Cheever with a six-pack of sodas, Zimmer with Wild Turkey—they began talking about books and writing and, of course, Zimmer's future. The first thing he had to do, said Cheever, was get out of Utah; one did not make a literary career in Utah. Cheever would be glad to arrange a place for Zimmer at Yaddo that summer—he was a board member; he would take care of everything—and so on, for some four hours. “And I was, like, Wow,” said Zimmer.

  Because at this point I was pretty eager to get out of Salt Lake myself. I'd been in school too long, and ever since I'd walked away from the church, my wife, and my engineering degree, my father wouldn't have anything to do with me. Essentially I hadn't had a father in three years at that point, so Cheever really struck a chord. I looked at him and thought, “Boy, here's a guy who's in control and who's an authority in the life I've chosen to lead, as well as a father figure who actually embraces what I'm doing.”

  For the rest of Cheever's visit, Zimmer was his companion of choice. “No, thank you, I'll just have Max take me,” he'd say whenever Smith offered a ride to this or that function. On the last day, Zimmer arrived at the Lake City Motel to give Cheever a lift to the airport, but Cheever was tired and wanted to lie down for a while. He asked Zimmer to lie beside him. Zimmer was a little “alarmed,” but did as he was asked; then, while they spoke, Cheever took the young man's hand and guided it to his crotch. Zimmer felt a “slight hardness under the corduroy pants” and tactfully withdrew his hand—forever remembering the moment (as he would write in his journal five years later) “with dizzying revulsion.” (“I have a seizure of lewdness and arrogance that seems to me sinful,” Cheever wrote at the time, “that is deserving of punishment. I am more frightened than remorseful.”) Until then, the sum of Zimmer's gay experience had been an experimental romp in junior high school, as well as a few minutes of mutual masturbation with a fellow Mormon—but those partners had been his own age. He wasn't altogether sure what to make of the present episode, though he prayed it was an aberration, since he'd already set his heart on leaving Utah and going to Yaddo and so forth. In any event, when Cheever asked for a hug as they were leaving, Zimmer obliged him; the embrace lingered until a maid paused in the open doorway. “I experienced a profound stirring of love,” Cheever remembered, while Zimmer felt a further surge of “confusion and revulsion.”

  Cheever proceeded to Stanford to visit Federico and give another reading. In a rather fraught coincidence, Gurganus was also at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, and when Federico showed his father to his room at Dinah's Garden Hotel on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, there was a conspicuous bowl of fruit waiting with a note attached: “Nothing could be finer / than the thought of you at Dinah's / exiled to El Camino / at the mirth of your bambino.” Cheever wasn't much amused, and when the three met for dinner, he seemed determined to put the waggish young man in his place. “Everybody knows that,” he said haughtily, when Gurganus quoted an aperçu from Randall Jarrell's satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution (to wit, how the buildings of a fictional college based on Sarah Lawrence—Gurganus's alma mater—seemed half designed by Bottom the Weaver and half by Mies van der Rohe). Gurganus perhaps had no idea of Cheever's loathing for Jarrell, but the rest of the evening was like that, too: “I was the whipping boy,” he recalled. “He was showing a member of his family that I didn't matter much.” Only once, really, was their old rapport in evidence, when Gurganus eagerly raised his hand after Cheever's reading. “Tell me, Mr. Cheever,” he said. “Do you write with a typewriter or in longhand?” Cheever composed himself and replied, “I inscribe on stone tablets.”

  As he left Dinah's to catch a plane to Los Angeles (and Hope Lange), Cheever spotted a wet playing-card facedown on El Camino Real. He turned it over—the two of clubs. “From that moment onward my erotic, familial and financial life would soar,” Cheever wrote eighteen months later. “So much for portents.”

  * A vow he kept in his last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (see page 55 re Sears's second wife).

  *”I can find nothing in Chekov to quote,” Cheever wrote Gurganus, “I can find almost nothing of Chekov to read and what I've done is to invent a Chekov as I think he would have invented a Lermontov under the same circumstances.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  {1977}

  TRUST IN THE LORD,” Cheever noted, once he'd returned from that eventful trip to the West. “Use your intelligence, keep your skin clean.” He tried to reassure himself that his motives were pure where Max was concerned—he simply wished, after all, to “give [Max] some freedom from the darkness of that place”—and he expr
essed (albeit equivocally) similar sentiments in the letters he began sending the young man at the rate of two or three a week: “Firstly this is a no-shit friendship and I have assumed you into no league. I thought your work first-rate before we met and it is you—whom I scarcely know—and your work that will move the train. That I love you has nothing to do with the case. The young and the old are meant to pool their advantages and with luck this is what we will do.” Cheever promptly endeavored to prove his sincerity. He sent “Utah Died for Your Sins” to McGrath at The New Yorker, even though the story had already been accepted by a little magazine on the other coast, Quarry West—but in any case, and for a number of reasons (one of which was the word “fuck”), the story wasn't right for The New Yorker. Cheever also sent a copy to the president of Yaddo, Curtis Harnack, with a peremptory little note: “The various dead-lines and other formalities don't seem to prevail under the circumstances. Zimmer is thirty-two and I know him to be civil, clean and industrious.”

  Meanwhile, back in Utah, the object of all this generosity was at once flattered, puzzled, and not a little anxious. One of the most famous authors in the world was devotedly promoting his work, not to mention writing him constant letters in which he (Cheever) was perfectly willing to “talk about his dick,” among other things: “And I was thinking, ‘God, how'm I gonna answer these letters?’” Max wonderingly remembered.

  I'm just a hick from Utah. I could not answer every one he sent me. The hazard was that my letters would be so boring that he'd lose interest in me and that would be the end of the friendship. So it would take me a day to write a letter back to him. Of course I didn't have a model to go by except the letters he'd written me, so I tried to write him back in the same way—the same voice, the same kind of frankness, same kind of cynicism, sophistication and stuff. That was tough.