Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Christmas was better for the simple reason that Federico came home from Stanford. “The equilibrium that Fred brings to this establishment is inestimable,” Cheever wrote. “[W]ith Fred here the enigmatic aspects of my life seem to be no more than shadows I have always hoped them to be.” Nor could he fail to notice that Mary was transformed in their son's presence, chatting at table with perfect ease after so long a frost (“I glimpse how difficult I am for her as a husband”). Amid the largesse that Cheever freely bestowed at the time—cars, televisions, minks (one for Hope, too)—was a brand-new BMW 320i for Federico, this because the young man's girlfriend had dumped him with the words “Grow up and get a car!” “He is a most judicious, loving and comely young man,” Cheever wrote that Christmas, while noting further that he (Cheever) had just given Bathsheba (the dog) “her check for $50,000.”

  In fact, relations had vastly improved with all his children, who had turned out miraculously well: Ben was rising in the ranks at Reader's Digest and running marathons; Susan had gone to France to work on her first novel. “My enthusiasm for you three is boundless,” Cheever wrote her that autumn (signing himself “Yours, John”). He was especially pleased with the fact that Susan had finally broken up with Warren Hinckle. Two years before, when Newsweek was about to transfer Susan to San Francisco so she could marry Hinckle (who'd “sort of left his wife” but was still living with her), Cheever had invited his daughter to join him for a luncheon at the Ettlingers’ house in Rockland County. “What do you think of Tad?” he asked afterward, referring to the elegant older man whose name she hadn't caught. When he told her that “Tad” was Calvin Tomkins, the notable New Yorker writer, Susan's “jaw dropped”: not only was she a “huge fan” of Tomkins, but she'd once spoken to him at length on the telephone, when she interviewed him for a magazine piece on Buckminster Fuller. And so, while Susan renewed her acquaintance with Tomkins, Cheever “did some sleuthing” on her behalf—asking Ettlinger about the status of Tomkins's marriage (not so good). Things progressed nicely, and finally, in the summer of 1978, Susan took her father to lunch at Four Seasons and announced that she was quitting Newsweek and moving to France with Tomkins to write her novel; meanwhile she needed her parents to take care of Bathsheba, the dog. “And he said ‘okay’ “ she remembered, “and I felt it was him giving me his blessing, because running off to France was kind of a harebrained adventure. I had a really good job at Newsweek, and my father loved the fact that I had that job. But he was just thrilled.” France and Tomkins, after all, were not San Francisco and Hinckle.

  Cheever was, at first, less than thrilled by Susan's literary ambitions. There were the obvious reasons—it was a tough life, lonely and often impecunious—and reasons that were somewhat harder to express. One way to put it, perhaps, was that Cheever regarded himself as the rare sort of writer who communed with an actual muse, and anyone else presuming to do so was “throwing up a clay pigeon,” said Ben, who'd once shown his father a story that his fifth-grade teacher had considered wonderful. “It's in the first person,” Cheever remarked, “and you have to earn the right to write in the first person.” Also, as Federico pointed out, their father's talent “emanated from the conflict in his soul, and it really isn't anything he would have wished on anyone else.” So he'd discouraged his children from being writers, but, whatever he might have said, the actual example he set was rather compelling. “One gift I got from my father,” said Susan, “was the lesson that writing was something you can do.” Almost every morning of his adult life, Cheever had eaten breakfast and then gone to a room and typed for a while; in Scarborough he'd occupied a room next to Susan's, and sometimes her hamsters would escape and nibble his ankles. “Writing,” his daughter concluded, “was something he did between rescuing hamsters and picking you up at school.”

  While she was in France, Cheever sent her a clipping from a local paper in which he was quoted (alongside a photo of himself in a dinner jacket) as plugging her forthcoming novel: “But she doesn't have to read mine,” he'd added, “so I don't have to read hers.” In fact, Cheever was eager to read his daughter's novel—for a number of reasons—though it was a pretty circumspect business on both sides. “I never showed my father anything I had written until it had been bought by a publishing house and was in final manuscript form,” she remembered. “I didn't ask for help, and he didn't offer it. When he did read my novels, he was polite but perfunctory. ‘I liked it very much,’ he would say, or ‘I thought it was fine.’ “ Whatever else he might have thought, Cheever was gratified to learn that her protagonist's father was a Columbia professor who'd written a study of Gide, and not (as he put it) “an old man who is too drunk to dance the Charleston.” He'd remarked to a friend that he was aghast at the prospect of her writing a sort of Daddy Dearest roman-à-clef, and when this proved not to be the case, he underlined the point in a puff piece for New York magazine, “My Daughter, The Novelist”: “We have both agreed that fiction is not crypto-autobiography. … The father of the heroine in her splendid novel, Looking for Work, parts his hair in the middle. I wouldn't be seen dead with a center part.” Moreover—pace his caveats about being a writer—he noted that her career choice “seemed to prove that in some ways [he] enjoyed her esteem. One couldn't ask for more.”

  Particularly in the last couple of years, he'd also made an effort to win back the esteem of his older son, and to that end (once Susan and Tomkins had returned from France in the spring) Cheever invited the whole family to stay at the Ritz and watch Ben run in the Boston Marathon. Since it was Patriots’ Day, April 16, they attended a re-enactment of Lexington and Concord, and later jostled among the crowd on Boylston Street trying to get close to the finish line—but it was hard to see much, and the day was chilly, so Cheever announced that he was heading back to the hotel. His daughter remembered watching him go: “As I look at his back in my mind's eye, I think, ‘There was something expectant about the way he left the race.’” Ben, for his part, had already crossed the finish line and gone back to the Ritz, where a stack of messages was waiting from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, even the Quincy Patriot Ledger. He was soaking in a hot tub when Cheever stuck his head in the door: “You finished the marathon?” he asked. Ben nodded: “And you won the Pulitzer Prize.”

  The family assembled afterward in the Ritz dining room, where the chef produced an enormous blazing Baked Alaska. Cheever, chatting with reporters, was careful to mention his son's achievement as well as his own: “Ben finished the Marathon in under three hours and I won what is perhaps literature's most cherished prize. It was a day for athleticesthetic celebration.” To a Patriot Ledger reporter, however, he said what was perhaps foremost on his mind: “I never believed in my childhood days in Quincy that I would be sitting here as a fresh Pulitzer Prize winner.” But there he was.

  CHEEVER STILL AWOKE most mornings with an awful cafard, and—given so many happy things in his life—he couldn't help wondering whether his constant smoking had something to do with it. Since adolescence he'd smoked two or three packs of Marlboros a day, and before that he'd smoked cedar bark rolled in toilet paper (“smoking meant joining the company of robust men”). The first thing he did at his desk each day was light a cigarette, and indeed it was almost impossible to imagine working except in a cloud of smoke. Past efforts to quit had been unavailing. Twenty years before, he'd recorded holding off until noon or so, but, as he put it, his head kept “leaving [his] neck” and floating away (“I always catch it before it goes off towards the railroad tracks but it is disconcerting”). Such was his intense craving that Cheever wondered whether he was “requit[ing]” some erotic need, a notion that once led to his writing a story about a man who gives up smoking and goes mad, attacking a woman he mistakes for a Lucky Strike.*

  In March, Cheever began attending SmokEnder meetings with a lot of frumpy matrons (“Helen Hokinson ladies”) in White Plains: “[S]itting on a folding chair,” he wrote, “a woman of little intelligence, charm or information says: Reward y
ourself. Make a trip to the five and dime. Reserve a best-seller at the public library. Buy yourself a rose.” Cheever persevered withal: as instructed, he counted the butts in his ashtray each day, and tried distracting himself with long walks and train rides. It took about a month or so, but a few days after winning the Pulitzer (and two weeks after celebrating his fourth year of sobriety), Cheever was smoke-free. “[T]his has involved some serious redistribution of energies,” he wrote Max. “It is very difficult to work, I have a hardon all the time and I keep losing my temper.”

  His cafard persisted as well, which he supposed had more to do with loneliness than nicotine after all. Back in November he'd finally wangled a trip to Oswego as a visiting writer (“Everybody at college was amazed that I was able to score a writer of Cheever's caliber,” Max ruefully recalled), after which Max had written him a pointed letter about “the thrills of his wedding anniversary”: “I am, quite plainly, the supplicant and I find the role self-destructive,” Cheever brooded in his journal (where he'd begun referring to Max as “Rip Procrustes,” by way of suggesting the latter's adaptability). In his own letters Cheever insinuated that he himself was hardly chopped liver: his was the world of “acclaim and substance,” he was desired by famous actresses (plural), and yet for all that he remained enamored of some ex-Mormon nobody in Oswego. “On Friday I did an ABC tape on the American Male,” he reported to Max in January. “ ‘In my long life,’ I said, ‘I have seen nothing more beautiful, splendid and mysterious than demure-ness in a woman.’ The script girl blushed and asked if I was busy for lunch. I was. I bought Hope a $55 lunch and when she said goodbye to me, on her doorstep, I remembered how splendidly you grasp my loneliness.” The key phrase was on her doorstep, as Hope failed to grasp his loneliness the way Max did. These days, when lunch was over, she always had to rush off somewhere—to exercise class, a rehearsal, the airport, anything to avoid grasping his loneliness. And while eating at those tony restaurants, Cheever wondered if other diners guessed at the sterility of their affair: “I am not ardent and I think I might appear to someone at another table as an aging homosexual, dedicated to some wayward asshole, but determined to appear straight,” he noted after that fifty-five-dollar lunch. “I am lonely and lost.”

  A few days later, he phoned Ned Rorem and said he needed to see him as soon as possible, since Rorem was the “only homosexual” he knew in New York. Rorem invited him to lunch, but also cautiously asked his longtime partner—a thirty-nine-year-old musician named Jim Holmes—to be present. Cheever arrived early, stepped inside the door and dropped his pants, protesting his loneliness as he chased Rorem around the apartment. “Please come out!” he cried, when Rorem locked himself in the bathroom. “I'll be good!” At length Rorem sat warily on a sofa with Cheever (pants still down), until Holmes arrived—at which moment, said Rorem, “John forgot about me for the rest of his life.” Over lunch they discussed their guest's loneliness, and afterward Cheever asked Holmes to sit and hold him a while. The next morning he phoned Rorem: would Ned mind terribly if he gave Jim a call? “[He] asks not one question about my relationship to JH,” Rorem mused in his diary. “Suppose I went to his house and made passes at his spouse while at table with them both?”

  As it happened, Holmes was also depressed at the time: for twelve years he'd been eclipsed by his lover's achievements, and it was gratifying to be needed by an even more famous artist, whom he found charming besides—albeit in a “childlike” way, said Rorem. “JH, with the air of Florence Nightingale tending the wounded, has seen John often, and found tranquility therein, the way maniacs are said to find tranquility as babysitters.” The two met at various posh hotels (“I like to remember that we have made love in The Drake, the Plaza and the Hilton,” Cheever wrote Holmes, “and I would like to feel your gentle hands on my cock in a hundred more hotels”), and as a result Cheever noted a vast improvement in his general outlook. But Rorem took a dim view. One day Cheever was visiting the Academy when he noticed the secretary chatting with Rorem on the phone, whereupon Cheever asked to say hello to his old friend: “We must have words together,” Rorem said balefully Cheever hoped to avoid even speculating on such a conversation, and really had to admit that parting with Holmes would be little more than a “physical inconvenience.” But who needed the inconvenience? “That the pleasure I take in Jim's company should in any way seem destructive is to me unimaginable,” he wrote Rorem. “I know how long your association has been and I can only imagine the depth of your love but I think that neither Jim nor I are inclined to challenge this.”

  The beginning of the end came, in any event, when Holmes manifested his “lack of maleness” by commenting on the upholstery of a given hotel's furniture (“Suddenly an abyss opens between them”). Since, however, the affair had provided Cheever with a crucial degree of equanimity where Max was concerned, he tried for a while to mold Holmes into a more pleasing form: “I think I am not particularly susceptible to the beauty of men,” he wrote Holmes, “but I love your smile because I know it to be genuine and your eyes because I think them level and manly;” as for the paramount purpose of “large orgasims” [sic], they served to “put a man's feet back on the stern path we know life to be.” Cheever also mentioned how much he enjoyed things like boxing matches in White Plains, which he attended once a month with members of the Friday Club. But it was no good. Whatever Max's shortcomings, at least he could “pass a football and catch a fish,” whereas Cheever wondered whether Holmes could even ride a bicycle. And yet Max hardly answered his letters or phone calls anymore. “I am an old, old king in love with a silly creature who keeps the pigs clean,” Cheever lamented.

  * Technically The World of Apples was still in print, but almost impossible to find.

  † Gottlieb's selection included every story published in the five previous collections, as well as two uncollected stories, “The Common Day” (1947) and “Another Story” (1967); he also included two stories from the 1956 Stories with Jean Stafford et al., omitting “The National Pastime.” According to Gottlieb, Cheever's input was minimal: “My vague memory is that there may have been at the fewest one, and at the most three, stories that he wanted included and that I hadn't included.”

  * Originally published in The New Yorker (March 7, 1964) as “The Habit,” it appears in The Stories of John Cheever as the last of four sketches in “Metamorphoses.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  {1979}

  CHEEVER HAD COME A LONG WAY from the eleven-year-old boy who'd promised his proud Yankee parents never to seek fame or wealth in his literary career. His new agent, Lynn Nesbit, had negotiated a half-million-dollar advance on his next novel, and Cheever had invested much of the proceeds in short-term, tax-free municipal bonds—enchanted by the idea of making money without lifting a finger. “It would be a lie to say that I am disinterested in fame and wealth—I ardently desire both,” he'd admitted in his journal after finishing Falconer. But then, really, the giddy pleasure he took in the accoutrements was more endearing than not. He adored riding in limousines, a mink-coated wife at his side, and would unabashedly exclaim over the splendors of a fine hotel (“this is the first time I've ever had a view of the park, you know, the first time,” he told a Washington Post reporter while leaning “happily” out his window at the Plaza).

  It was also characteristic of the sober, somewhat frail Cheever to be intimidated by certain high-powered public situations. When Susan had a book party at Elaine's for her first novel, she insisted that Elaine stand out on the street and make sure her father didn't just peek into the window and bolt; once he'd been drawn inside, he promptly glommed onto his old friend and Harper editor, Frances Lindley, with whom he could just sit and be Joey. “Some people seem to have a gift for public personality and I just don't have it,” said the man who—in some respects—never quite got used to himself as a famous person. Almost anyone who wanted to visit Cheever was welcome (however grudgingly), and in his last years, at least, he would give readings or signings for whos
oever happened to ask. Also, the fact that he impersonated the gentry even more blatantly than O'Hara or Marquand was, on some level, rather playful: he was capable of laughing about the horses he rented for PR purposes, the conspicuous brace of faithful retrievers, the indefatigable scything and firewood-splitting and so forth, while at the same time it was nothing less than the consummation of his fondest dream. Naturally he jumped at the chance to be featured in a Rolex advertisement—very pleased that his name was associated with top-drawer merchandise—after which he could scarcely resist taking off his six-thousand-dollar Oyster Perpetual Superlative Chronometer and asking a friend (“Feel this!”) to consider its luxurious heft. Even better was being recognized on the street by deferential strangers—not simply as some run-of-the-mill actor, say, but as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dean of the American Short Story, who moreover happened to be the same friendly-looking regular guy who appeared in the jacket photos. “As his fame increased,” his daughter noticed, “he developed another smile for cameras and people he didn't especially want to talk to. This smile left out his eyes and involved exposing his lower teeth. He had a kind of tense heh, heh, heh laugh that went with it.”

  For the most part he became a lot more pompous. In an earlier phase of his fame—circa the 1964 Time cover, for instance—Cheever had usually been willing to mock his own pretensions, whereas the later Cheever often seemed to forget that the whole Elegant Paragon of Literature thing was something of a pose. “There are people who consider me, now that I'm sober, to be much more of a bore than I ever was falling down,” he observed in 1981, and among those who considered him thus were, first and foremost, his family. “He really was boring and insufferable,” said Federico, who loved him dearly. “Because he's thinking, like, gosh, he's arrived, he's made it. The first thing you have to keep in mind is, he's a drunk who doesn't drink anymore. They try to enjoy their lives. What does that mean? When you're a musician, people can ask you to play, and when you're a movie star, people can ask for your autograph, but what does it mean to be a famous writer? Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That's the goodies you get.”