Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Cheever made the most of his goodies. In later years he deployed his minimal French not only in referring to literary classics (Le Rouge et le noir) but also, to the greatest extent possible, in everyday speech, as when he'd mention an art opening (“I'm going to Peter's vernissage”). “I've never been any great shakes as a thinker,” he'd frankly admitted to an admirer in 1967, and for most of his life he combined a distaste for intellectual cant with only a slight, wistful insistence that he be taken seriously as an intellectual in his own right. True, he'd never finished high school, but nonetheless he'd become one of the world's great writers, and naturally he wanted people to appreciate the fact that he'd attained a kind of eclectic erudition. But fame blurred discretion, and more and more Cheever's reach exceeded his grasp. “I've been reading Wordsworth's preludes,” he remarked to Lehmann-Haupt (who could have sworn there was only one Prelude), and while riding home from Liz Updike's wedding with an acclaimed Whitman scholar, Cheever grandly held forth on the subject of poetry—or pohtra, as he pronounced it. “John,” his wife sighed at last, “knock it off about that poetry stuff.”

  Cheever's self-importance was rather in evidence during a visit from the young James Kaplan, who'd published a run of stories in The New Yorker and was eager to cultivate an acquaintance with one of the magazine's most fabled writers. Kaplan had heard that Cheever answered his mail, so he'd written a few diffident notes to which Cheever had replied with the usual lapidary epigrams.* Finally, Kaplan called to say he was coming north for Christmas and wondered if he could pay a visit to the great man. But of course, said Cheever, who obligingly gave directions to Cedar Lane.

  “One learns to separate the writer from the writing,” Kaplan reflected many years later, “and my meeting with Cheever was sort of my final lesson.” The first thing Kaplan noticed was how “tiny” Cheever was—a long head shorter than Kaplan himself, who also noticed that the low-ceilinged house seemed built on its master's scale (“It reminded me of Diane Arbus's photo of the Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx”). Cheever beckoned Kaplan to an easy chair in front of the fire, gave him a tumbler of his “best Bulgarian vodka,” then sat opposite and waited. “I was nervous, and he was not helping me,” said Kaplan, who wondered if Cheever even remembered who he was. Gulping vodka, he began to recite his entire publishing record, with particular regard to a long story he'd published in The New Yorker, “Love and Painting.” “Mary!” Cheever shouted to his wife in the kitchen. “This is the young man who wrote the painting story!” Somewhat relieved, Kaplan proceeded to mention that he'd been helped along the way by his “revered mentor,” William Maxwell—information that seemed to put Cheever on guard (just as Maxwell had seemed oddly reticent on the subject of Cheever). Then the phone rang: Herbert Mitgang of the Times, calling to interview Cheever about the Stories collection. While answering questions in a level voice, Cheever mocked his interlocutor with elaborate facial mugging for Kaplan's benefit; the young man smiled weakly and drank more vodka. After twenty minutes or so, Cheever hung up, and Kaplan—casting about for something to say—asked, “Do you drive?” As he later explained:

  I'd asked for a complimentary reason: I was thinking of Nabokov, who didn't drive. I was desperate. There was nothing to talk about. I was having an audience with John Cheever. On the one hand I wanted it to last, and on the other I wanted to get the hell out of there. So I ask: “Do you drive?” And instantly—he's not drinking—he flies into high dudgeon, to my horror: “I drive, I ski, I mountain climb … !”—a whole catalogue of accomplishments. My mouth was falling open.

  Cheever abruptly concluded the interview and showed Kaplan to his car. Rising to his feet, Kaplan realized how drunk he was, and wondered whether he'd be able to drive all the way home in the snow. “It was a miracle I survived.”

  With old friends in the Friday Club, Cheever tried to be magnanimous. Art Spear jovially wrote Litvinov that they were all “basking in the reflected light” of Cheever's fame; for his part, Cheever reminded himself to feign interest in his friends’ affairs (though they hadn't asked a single question about his Harvard degree) and be “as yielding and generous as possible in any controversy.” There were limits, however. When Spear presumed to observe that he received “exactly the same mail” as Cheever, fame or no, the latter was forced to “snap at [his] dear friend,” assuring Spear that he (Cheever) received “checks, love letters and invitations” in relative profusion. As for his long-standing animus toward Tom Glazer, it got worse in spite of himself, at least on paper. Cheever hadn't been very supportive when Glazer's wife left him in 1974, and ultimately Cheever decided the man was a “homosexual spinster” who chose to live in wretched, homophobic isolation rather than admit his true appetites. Nor did Cheever soften much when he heard a rumor that it was none other than Glazer's body that had been found recently, charred by the third rail at the Scarborough station; Glazer had been missing for a while, and certain neighbors had long considered him a likely candidate for suicide. “He was quite famous until he was discovered to be alive,” Cheever noted in his journal, after the putative corpse had returned from an obscure folksinging gig in California.* “I can't judge the sincerity of my regrets. … He fills me with a dismay that I seem unable to conceal.”

  Always at his best with dogs, Cheever was comforted in these final years by a golden retriever named Edgar, whom his daughter described as a “boisterous, leggy, badly bred dog with a square head and a habit of dropping wet rocks on your feet.” Edgar, a bitch, had been named Tara when she belonged to Ben, who'd “loaned” her to his parents when his son was born in 1972; Cheever changed the dog's name to “Shithead” before settling on “Edgar,” and the two became almost inseparable. On summer nights Cheever would occasionally take Edgar to Burger King (fries for her, a sandwich for himself) and then to a Carvel stand for her favorite treat, a chocolate flying saucer. “Brisky-frisky!” he'd call, coaxing the dog upstairs to his bedroom, which would have been a very lonely place without her. “When [s]he wakes me, late at night, rooting noisily amongst [her] dingle-berries,” Cheever wrote his daughter, “we exchange the most profound and tender smiles before we both return to sleep.”

  More than ever, Cheever took pleasure in being a familiar face in his adopted hometown, the virtues of which he extolled with impressive zeal. When Cheever was profiled by People in 1979, the magazine described Ossining as a “gritty enclave, dominated by Sing Sing penitentiary;” Cheever, indignant, rushed to disavow the slur in the local Citizen Register: “Paradise on earth,” he said, “with its fine views of the Hudson, its unpretentious people, its good restaurants, its nearness to New York …” He meant every word of it, too, especially the part about unpretentious people, many of whom regarded Cheever as simply a nice (if eccentric) old man who didn't have a job; indeed, until the years of his greatest fame, even the more literate townsfolk had a hard time placing their most illustrious citizen. Cheever noted how once he'd been approached in Kipp's Pharmacy by a man who thought he was Burgess Meredith, then David Wayne; finally the man became flustered and said, “But you're somebody …“ “I am somebody,” Cheever replied, “and I like living in a community where everybody is somebody.” And this, in a way, was true—poignantly so. In 1935, at the outset of his lifelong exile from home, Cheever had written Reuel Denney: “I think, with a lot of satisfaction, about the town I came from with its ship-building plant and two-storey bank-building. And if you mention our name to the bar-tender or the clerk in the drug-store he'll say ‘yeah, old man Cheever, had two boys etc’ “ This, after all, was the world evoked in the Wapshot novels—what Seymour Wolk (owner of Kipp's Pharmacy, who considered Cheever a friend) called “the village kind of life where people know people.” Whenever Cheever went downtown, he was looking for company. He practiced Italian with various merchants, he chattily worked the booths at the Highland Diner or the lines at the bank, and toward the end of his life he was indisputably a local celebrity—not just because he was Cheever the au
thor, but because he was Cheever the citizen: the man who'd lived in the area for almost thirty years, who'd volunteered at the fire department and prison, who'd gone to AA meetings all over Westchester, and who always had a moment to stop and talk on Main Street. His family called him the Mayor of Ossining.

  And so in his own hometown he insisted on doing all his shopping, even though local merchants knew that he'd always pay the sticker price, that he was constitutionally incapable of haggling—that he was, in short (as Federico liked to remind him), “the biggest mark in Ossining.” Once, at a jewelry store in the Arcadian Shopping Center, he pointed to a bracelet he wanted to buy for his wife; the clerk picked up the wrong bracelet, which Cheever hastily purchased lest he embarrass the poor man. “There was a kind of little-boy quality about him,” said Bev Chaney, and perhaps this was simply another aspect of being a Cheever. As he mused in his journal, “I am reminded of the claustrophobia that attacked my mother and my brother in department stores, clothing stores, all sorts of commercial interiors. I will buy anything if you will set me free.” His bonhomie as “Mayor of Ossining” was one way of coping with such deep-seated, nervous uncertainty—part of a determined effort to feel at home in the world. He loved to linger in Barker's, a discount department store that was soothingly cavernous (like “the well-lived interior of an Unidentified Flying Object”), though it seemed to help that he'd struck up a friendship with the manager, Richard Van Tassell. Barker's was such a happy place that he and Natalie Robins would abscond there after the holiday feast, and when Natalie lost a child at birth, Cheever expressed condolences by writing her a long letter about Barker's (“The soapy, oriental perfumes in the air remind me of Woolworths in Quincy”).

  Spending time with unpretentious people, away from his usual public ethos, seemed to provide a blessed respite from being the tweedy, bow-tie-wearing John Cheever. Ray Mutter's nurse, Kay, sought to improve herself with courses at the local community college, but hesitated to bother Cheever with questions about a paper she wanted to write on “The Swimmer;” finally, though (at Mary Dirks's urging), she gave Cheever a call, and the two talked for more than an hour. After that, the nurse made a point of discussing Cheever's work with him whenever he came in for an appointment—which suited Cheever fine, since he liked to kill time in the afternoon by reading magazines in the waiting room (after he'd seen the doctor). Sometimes, too, he'd drop by Dom's Friendly Service in Croton just to chat with the owner, Dominick Anfiteatro, who cherished Cheever's company: “I couldn't wait when I'd see him, I'd run out there,” said Anfiteatro. “When he left me, he left me on a high for a good part of the day.” And just as Cheever used to enjoy laconic discussions about communism and whatnot with Peter Wesul at Treetops, he also liked to ride his bicycle to the Ascolis’ farm to buy brown eggs and sit on a stone fence with the superintendent, John Bukovsky, who remembered speaking of “spiritual things.” In church, on his knees, Cheever bitterly rebuked himself for—among other things—his irksome aversion to “unattractive” people (as Polly would have it) like that fat woman in the next pew, who was wearing the kind of mink stole “that used to be raffled off at Fireman's carnivals” (“But here then is my sin … to estrange myself from this stranger”).

  One never quite knew when some such sinful impulse would rear its head. Cheever was always happy to sign extra copies of his work for local booksellers—doing so in bed when he was dying from cancer—but woe unto the clerk who didn't immediately grasp that “the Collected” (as in, sharply, “Dyou have copies of the Collected?”) meant the big red book. But then there was the time Cheever was signing books after a reading at the public library, and a woman handed him a ratty paperback that looked filched from a Dumpster; Cheever signed it with a radiant smile. Not long after, however, at a signing in Vermont, an elegantly dressed woman handed Cheever a copy of The Wapshot Scandal that had actual toothmarks on it, whereupon he loudly insisted she buy a fresh copy of “the Collected”: “That I will endorse as you please,” he railed, “though preferably to your dog, who is obviously the only Cheever lover in your household!”

  “He was always at sea,” said Federico. “He didn't understand how the world worked. He was forever cheated by tradesmen, he bought the most ridiculous cars at the most ridiculous prices his entire life. He had no profession. He'd spent his entire career as a writer. He was not a high-school graduate. So he could say [pompous voice], ‘Listen, my good man … !’—and this over time became a habit, second nature, when he was up against the wall.” Being at sea also meant being the fat boy who wanted to be loved by everybody. “You don't even have to answer that kind of mail,” Bev Chaney would say, over and over, when Cheever would anxiously confide that the Newburgh Kiwanis (whatever) wanted him to read but, well, he'd rather not. Once, a man he'd chatted with on the train a couple of times, Martin Amsel, found Cheever's name in the phone book and invited him to “be a speaker” at the local Lions Club. “I'm terribly sorry,” said Cheever in a tired voice, “but I'm quite ill at the moment.” A few weeks later, Amsel opened the newspaper and saw that he was dead.

  AS PART OF AN EFFORT to mend fences with Ben and Lynda, Cheever had tried to help their troubled marriage by paying for his son to receive counseling from the family psychiatrist, J. William Silver-berg. (“You're asleep!” Ben indignantly noticed at one point, and the man gave a violent start: “What makes you think that?”) Cheever also invited the couple to join him for a trip to Bulgaria in the summer of 1979. Stopping in London, Cheever gave Lynda some money to go shopping, the better to spend a day getting to know his son again. “Sometimes,” he confided, “I experience a loneliness as painful as intestinal flu.” Ben could relate to that, since his wife rarely slept with him anymore; indeed, it was a little nettling for Ben to discover that their attractive Bulgarian translator, a very young woman named Alexandra, was sleeping with his father (a distinguished guest of the nation, after all). While the two skinny-dipped in the Black Sea, Ben worked out his frustrations with long morning jogs along the byways of Varna. (“The troupe we were traveling with was very bemused, because I had this flirtatious blond wife and yet I was getting up every morning at six to run. They felt I should have been screwing her instead of running so much. Which I also felt.”) By the end of the year, Ben realized his marriage was going nowhere—this at a time, oddly enough, when his frigid wife wanted a second child—and so he decided to take a Reader's Digest junket to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur (“massages and blow jobs”) by way of liberating himself. “On Saturday morning,” his father noted, “our son Ben, after a week in a spiritual retreat where he got fucked, has left his wife and returned home [i.e., to Cedar Lane], for it seems only a few hours.”

  Actually he stayed a few months, though he and his father seemed to remain amiable strangers: “I think we do not know one another,” the latter reflected; “I think it is our destiny that we never will.” Ben might have agreed, at least in retrospect. “Well, it's going, and Daddy will be pleased,” he announced to a guest one day, lighting a fire. “He had two great fears about me. The first was that I would not learn how to lay a proper fire, the second was that I would be a homosexual.” Even now his father often remarked that he hoped Ben wouldn't have his own “difficult propensities,” which Ben took to mean that his father hoped he wouldn't be burdened with talent—and that was a little wounding. Possibly to elucidate the matter, Cheever invited Ben to read his journals, and once sat beside him while he read; when Ben looked up, he noticed his father had been crying, though at the time he didn't connect this with all the obsessive references to homosexuality he kept encountering: “I didn't quite get it,” he later wrote, “or maybe I didn't want to get it. I was also surprised at how little I appeared in the text. I was surprised at how little any of us appeared, except perhaps my mother, who was not getting the sort of treatment that leads one to crave the limelight.”

  Then one day Ben took a bicycle ride with his father and Max. The two young men had pulled ahead, chatting about
their respective journals, when Max mentioned that he sometimes liked to use a kind of “shorthand” or “trigger phrase” rather than exhaust a memory by evoking it in detail. While living in Dobbs Ferry, for example, he'd gone to bed with a man who kept saying “you sweet thing,” and so Max's entry for that day was simply: “You sweet thing.” Ben was shocked: Had his father heard? What would happen if he found out? “He's gay!” Ben told his sister over the phone. “Max is gay! He made a pass at me!” Susan mentioned this to Calvin Tomkins, who just shook his head. “Ben is hysterical,” he said.

  Whether Max was any more gay than he'd ever been is a matter of conjecture; in any case he was no longer married and had, in fact, suffered a ghastly reversal of fortune. As a popular instructor in Oswego, he'd decided to stay put for another year before moving to Baltimore to be with his wife. Meanwhile he'd talked with some people in the English department at Johns Hopkins, who thought they might be able to find a place for him in the fall of 1979. (“I figured Hopkins is even farther from Ossining than Oswego,” he recalled. “I'd really be free of him then.”) But two weeks before the end of his last semester in Oswego—and not long after he'd tendered his resignation—his wife called and demanded a divorce; stunned, Max drove immediately to Baltimore, and during a long boozy dinner she confessed that she'd been having an affair with an older man.