Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Another memory that became a permanent part of Cheever's repertoire was his trip to the mountains of Macedonia to visit the famed Venga, a fat middle-aged woman who'd been blinded by lightning and given prophetic powers. Entering her cave, Cheever inquired why women didn't understand him and vice versa. “Women are jealous,” the oracle replied in so many words; “you understand them, all right!” Then she gave him a list of prominent Americans (including Jackie Onassis) who needed to stop drinking.

  Changing planes in Frankfurt on his way home, Cheever had arranged a brief rendezvous at the airport with Dennis Coates, who waited fruitlessly around the gate before spotting Cheever by chance on a moving walkway. He was alone. “Where's Mary?” asked Coates, and after a moment Cheever pointed to another lone figure some distance ahead of them. “We don't sit together,” he explained to his bemused friend.

  SOMETIMES CHEEVER blamed his wife for driving him into “bizarre practices,” and sometimes he thought Max was a surrogate for his dead brother (“I want a friend. I wanna friend”). Whatever the case, he tried very hard to keep things in perspective. As Cheever would have it, he and Max were just good pals who occasionally saw fit to indulge in a bit of “carnal tenderness.” And now that the ice had been broken in that respect, Cheever was all the more willing to “talk about his dick,” as Max discovered with no little foreboding. “If I sounded sinister yesterday morning [on the telephone], I was,” Cheever wrote not long before Max was due to return to Ossining en route to Yaddo. “When I am hard-packed I get quite sinister but after I've ruined the wallpaper I think myself jolly and easy-going.” In public, too, Cheever hinted rather broadly that he was not the conventional family man he seemed, while also stressing that he was worldly enough not to lose sleep about it. As he remarked to John Hersey before hundreds of undergraduates at Yale, “That one is in conflict with oneself—that one's erotic nature and one's social nature will everlastingly be at war with one another—is something I am happy to live with on terms as hearty and fleeting as laughter.” In fact, his laughter was fleeting indeed, and quite often he was “bewildered and apprehensive,” for he couldn't help identifying—now more than ever—with the objects of his lifelong loathing. “Brooding, as I must, about homosexuality,” he wrote Max, “I stepped out of the post-office yesterday morning and saw Them. … The old one was very skinny with a few strands of hair, dyed a marvelous yellow. The youth had all his hair and everything else, I guess, and he might have seemed quite beautiful if he didn't have a mouth like an asshole. The old one would be seen to walk as if his asshole were a mouth. In the back seat was an obligatory Mastaff [sic], a massive, ornamental, brainless dog named after some international cocksucker. ‘He'll keep me company when I am abandoned by Michael,’ the old fairy will tell his guests.”

  Max agreed that such a scenario was distasteful, and ever since that episode at the Croton Dam he'd continued to rationalize the matter as best he could: maybe that sort of thing would be a very rare occurrence, or, better still, Cheever might come to his senses and call it off; he was married, after all, while Max was practically engaged to a fellow graduate student named Marilyn. In any event, the young man loaded his rusty BMW and drove—in triumph, as it seemed to family and friends—forty-five hours straight through to New York, stopping for a night in Ossining. On the way, he tried to think positive thoughts: Cheever had gotten him a place at Yaddo; his intentions were good, at least; he seemed genuinely interested in Max's career. (“I love you because so much green[n]ess lies ahead of you and that I should in any way shadow or darken this would be wicked,” Cheever had written only a few weeks before.) Thus Max consoled himself, pulling into the driveway at Cedar Lane, but alas: “I knew before I left for Saratoga,” he sighed, “that I'd have to give him another hand-job.” (“[Max] seems a gentle fellow,” Cheever wrote afterward, “perhaps no more.”)

  For a couple of weeks, Max enjoyed himself at Yaddo—”a bughouse”: “I was just a stable boy from Utah, and everybody was fucking everybody.” To a distinguished poet (female) Max confided his sorrows over his would-be fiancée, Marilyn, with whom he was in a bad patch; the poet listened, sympathized, and took him to bed. Then Cheever arrived for a visit, which was mostly spent with Max in a motel room, and that was something else entirely. In Falconer, Farragut finds that he can “kiss Jody passionately, but not tenderly,” which was quite in accord with Max's memories of Cheever: “He would kiss me, and it was pretty brutal stuff. … Just this raw greed kind of thing.* I'm glad it wasn't gentle, to tell you the truth. I'm glad it was brutal, because that's the way I felt: this is a brutal thing I'm being asked to do, so it should be conducted brutally.” And when it was over, there was little in the way of afterglow. Cheever was happy (“jolly and easy-going”): he'd crack open a soda or pour some tea and go back to whatever they'd been talking about—his work, Max's, baseball, some funny anecdote perhaps.

  “What I seem to want,” Cheever noted, shortly after his return from Yaddo, “is a means of getting my rocks off with the least inconvenience, a degree of sentimentality and some decent jokes.” So he hoped. What was supposed to be especially funny was what transpired in those motel rooms (“you know better than the next man that bearass I look like something found on the road-shoulders of route #134”), and indeed it was the larky, laughing, casual aspect of male sex that seemed to appeal most. With Max he needn't worry about his performance (“I was delighted to be free of the censure and responsibility I have known with some women”), or whether he looked bad or said the wrong thing. This was a back-slapping friendship, after all: “I took a shit with the door open, snored, and farted with ease and humor, as did he.” But then if everything was so marvelous, Cheever wondered, why did he feel such “suicidal depression”?

  Perhaps it had to do with his stubborn awareness that he was, to be sure, casting an awfully long shadow over Max's “green[n]ess”: “Anyone who caressed and worshipped this old carcass would be someone upon whose loneliness, fear, and ignorance I preyed,” he admitted that summer in his journal. “This would be the exploitation of innocence.” Such a punishing degree of candor, however, could only be taken in moderate doses; usually he tried to persuade himself that Max was as happy (so to speak) as he was, or happy enough, and meanwhile he let it be known that there could be dire consequences if Max disappointed him. Gurganus, for one, was often invoked for Max's benefit, both as the embodiment of true homosexuality (“he suffers acutely from the loss of gravity that seems to follow having a cock up your ass or down your throat once too often”) and as living proof that it was unwise to spurn Cheever's advances. As he told Max more than a few times, he'd helped get “Minor Heroism” published in The New Yorker, but now that he'd withdrawn his patronage, Gurganus would never appear in the magazine again.*

  As for patronage, Cheever continued to hold up his end of the bargain, more or less, though he believed (as he wrote Max) that “to engage one's interest in the welfare and destiny of a younger writer is to eclipse and constrict one's own gifts.” The easy part was using his influence to get Max in the door: he gladly wrote recommendations for jobs and fellowships and so forth, and, more important, arranged for Max to have lunch that summer with Chip McGrath—who had, in fact, found “Utah Died for Your Sins” to be “quite promising” (“a mess, but a promising mess”). McGrath felt genuinely hopeful that it was only a matter of time before Max managed to “crack The New Yorker,” especially with the guidance of John Cheever, no less.

  But that guidance proved to be rather grudging and vague. “When I would bring him a piece of writing,” Max remembered, “I was expecting him to actually sit down with me, the way I did with my students, and go through a story line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Details and stuff like that. But he only spoke in the broadest generalities.” Reading one of Max's manuscripts that summer, Cheever commended his protégé's “voice” (“something I first got off a page in Salt Lake”), but was otherwise dismayed by what appeared to be “a catalogue of alienations�
��—which was pretty much the gist of his criticism, right up to the end. “The contempt you bring to this cast is very unlike you,” he remarked of another effort. “Fiction is very like love in that there is something lost and something gained.” Max didn't quite know how to apply such aphorisms to his work (“I'd turn them over and over in my head for days”)—nor was vagueness per se the most daunting part of their arrangement. For much of his adult life, Cheever sincerely believed that sexual stimulation improved his eyesight and overall concentration; while driving late at night, for example, he used to ask Mary “to fondle [his penis] to a bone” lest he have an accident. As he put it, “With a stiff prick I can read the small print in prayer books but with a limp prick I can barely read newspaper headlines.” And so with critiquing fiction. Whenever Max submitted a manuscript, Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a hand-job; then (as Max noted in his journal) “you [Cheever] take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on your face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion.” Perhaps needless to say, this would eventually lead to a rather formidable case of writer's block.

  But most of this was still in the future. That summer, after returning from Saratoga, Cheever began to get the impression that Max was avoiding him—a bit of a blow, because he'd hoped the two of them would spend that fall in Bennington, where Malamud had offered Cheever a three-month teaching appointment: “We would rent a quaint Vermont farmhouse and sleep in one another's arms,” Cheever had proposed. “In the mornings we would work. In the afternoons I would teach and you would ski the down-hill trails.” When Max didn't get back to him about that or much else, Cheever had to scrap the idea, and meanwhile he asked his old friend Rudnik (also at Yaddo) for news of Max. Rudnik replied that Max was getting “the wretch treatment” from his girlfriend Marilyn, and was thinking of paying her a visit in Baltimore, where—after dumping Max—she'd gone to work on her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. (Max had further intimated to Rudnik that his relationship with Cheever had taken a curious turn: “Max had the ability to talk about himself as if he were someone else,” Rudnik observed. “A kind of detached acceptance.”) Nor was Baltimore the only evasive action Max was considering. While at Yaddo he'd met Lewis Turco, director of the SUNY-Oswego writing program, who offered him a job. As Max recalled, “The first thing I thought was ‘Where is Oswego?’ And I looked it up on a map and saw that it was hundreds of miles from Ossining, and I thought, ‘Good. Good. I can get away from him without having my career destroyed.’ “

  He moved to Oswego in August, cutting short his stay at Yaddo, and soon reported to Cheever that he'd reconciled with his fiancée. “Your description of your love for Marilyn pleased me deeply,” Cheever replied, “since it refreshed my sense of that genuineness of heart I so admire in you and made clear the fact that for both of us the love of a woman is without parallel. This seems in no way to diminish the need I feel for your company, in every way.” Whereupon Max's notes became even more sporadic, until around Thanksgiving they stopped altogether: he and Marilyn had gotten married over the holiday. “I'm determined that this should end happily but I don't know where we are,” Cheever had written him a few days before. “Often, when I lie down, I seem to hold you in the crook of my right arm and I wish to hell you wash your hair oftener.”

  The fact was, his heart was breaking. He was in love with Max, and if Max was gone, he didn't know where else to turn. “I may have lost the great gift of loving a woman,” he wrote that autumn. “This is a parting of great vastness and why should it be forced upon me. There is my loneliness, the fact that I seem to want to return to the country of my brother's love, forswearing all the lights of the world.” As for Hope Lange—his “golden-haired princess (dyed and well into her second face-lift)”—she now kept an apartment in the city, and sometimes Cheever would bestir himself to have lunch with her; this was good for a few laughs and little else. The city made him nervous, and he was careful to catch an early train, anxious to get home before dark. But home, too, offered less and less comfort. His wife seemed to find him more abhorrent than ever. She told friends that she'd never bothered to read Falconer* and gave its author the silent treatment on almost any pretext. Around the time of Max's defection, Cheever recorded a typical dispute: “Mary does not make coffee. I complain and so there is a quarrel. I cry. I cry because, at the risk of seeming petulant there seems to be nothing in my life but these corridors.”

  * A few of the more knowledgeable reviewers made the same point. In The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers wrote that a look back at Cheever's earlier work “reveals numerous occurrences of homosexual material—occurrences to which the straight characters invariably respond with fear or distaste.”

  * It is instructive to compare Vidal's version of this episode, which he evidently related without any knowledge of Cheever's more colorful tale. According to Vidal, the key occupants of the bus—not limo—were Cheever, himself, and William Saroyan. Since their driver seemed a bit reckless, Cheever remarked to Vidal, “If this bus overturns, Saroyan will be the only one the Bulgarian papers will feature.” Whereupon the two paused to marvel at Saroyan's enduring fame in communist countries, even though the author of such Depression-era classics as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was all but forgotten in the West, which may explain why Cheever never mentioned him in connection with the Bulgarian trip.

  *”I know that my need for love can be gross, self-centered, a sort of greed,” Cheever wrote in his journal.

  * As it happened, Gurganus did not publish another story in The New Yorker until 1995, though by then he'd become world-famous as the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989), which spent more than eight months on the Times bestseller list.

  * The problem, more likely, was that she had read Falconer—noting the uses to which Cheever had put certain real-life episodes in crafting the villainous Marcia Farragut.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  {1977-1978}

  CHEEVER CONSOLED HIMSELF with travel. A month after his return from Saratoga, he accepted an invitation to spend a few days at the Thaws’ dairy farm near Cooperstown. It wasn't a bad trip: He painted a fence with Eugene, danced to the jukebox with Clare at a raffish restaurant, and attended a tea party at the elegant home of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fenimore Cooper. But he was lonelier than ever—the sort of loneliness he used to feel at the Boyers’ compound on Whiskey Island (listening to distant laughter and the soft, disturbing thwock of tennis balls): an odd man out, straining to ingratiate himself. “I seem to be one of those singular … old men who appear in summery reminiscences,” he wrote afterward. “Kind to dogs and children, jolly mostly, sometimes witty, wearing old-fashioned clothes with a moth hole here and there, a fountain head of charming and eccentric memory. … That he hankers for the uncircumcised cock of the fourteen year old farmhand seems to be part of the picture.” Next he spent a couple of weeks with Mary at the Wauwinet House on Nantucket—”as much of my past as I suppose Switzerland and the desert is of yours,” he wrote the inscrutable Max; “although for the first time I feel somewhat estranged.” While the other guests painted watercolors and flew box kites, Cheever rode a bicycle around the island and occasionally sought out backgammon partners (“one could die of boredom”). At one point he kissed an old one-night fling of his named Molly, who gently resisted being wrestled onto the bed, and perhaps it was just as well.

  He'd been very excited about “returning to the banks of the Iowa River” for a reading in the fall, but the reality proved rather desolate: his lodgings were “wretched,” and most of the faces had changed. His old student Tom Boyle had stuck around to finish his Ph.D., and after the reading (“Justina” again) Cheever took the young man's hand and sighed, “Well, at least you're here.” Then it was off to Washington, D.C., for a videotaped program with the thirty-two-year-old poet Daniel Halpern—a literary chat between the older and younger generations, sponsored by t
he United States Information Agency. Each man was convinced he'd disgraced the proceedings. Halpern had a bad case of strep throat and hardly said a word, or so he remembers, whereas Cheever found the young man “composed and articulate” and himself a disaster (“I clutch the arms of my chair, lick my lips nervously and am very slow to respond”). Away from the camera, the two found much to talk about. Cheever invited Halpern to his hotel room, where he poured him a glass of Scotch; when Halpern asked whether Cheever would be joining him, the latter explained that he didn't drink anymore but always kept a bottle on hand when he traveled (“I love to see it sitting there, and when it's empty I get another”). Both men had suffered terribly from phobias, and Halpern was struck by how “amazingly open” Cheever was on the subject, particularly as it touched on his problems with impotence. Afterward, Cheever wrote Halpern a few letters, which reflected the sort of bravura candor he seemed to reserve mostly for congenial strangers (he never saw Halpern again):

  Your psychiatrist and mine can't be the same but they entertain the same conclusions. When I told mine that I had happily fucked hundreds of women and quite a few men he said that this was a carapace that all neurotics build to dissemble their impotence.* I thought this over and fucked some more and reported to him that my carapace seemed so successful that I thought I would devote myself to it.