Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  “Max called on Thursday to say that he had broken with his wife and would be here on Friday,” Cheever noted at the time. Max's lease was about to expire in Oswego, his old job had already been filled, Johns Hopkins had fallen through with a bang, he was estranged from family and church in Utah, and he needed a place to live (not to mention a means of support) as soon as possible. A girl he'd begun seeing in Oswego hailed from Westchester, and was home for the summer, so Max moved to an attic apartment in Dobbs Ferry—a few miles downriver from Ossining. “If the water was right and the tide ebbing I could swim it,” Cheever gleefully wrote his protégé. “Now and then I ask my cock if it can't imagine that Zimmer might like to fuck someone his own age but it doesn't seem to hear me.”*

  And so—at Cheever's insistence—Max began coming round Cedar Lane three or four times a week, and for a while nobody seemed to suspect a thing. He and Cheever bantered like a couple of old cronies, as Max wasn't apt to be deferential, at least around others. When Cheever made fun of Glazer, for instance—sneering at the way pizza cheese hung off his chin, or the man's maudlin tendency to recite his many woes—Max (who liked Glazer) called Cheever “a fucking brat.” And everybody laughed, most of all Cheever. Why should anyone see anything amiss? Max wasn't the least effeminate, and he was far from the first young man to hang around the place—there had been Rudnik, Lang, Schultz, to name a few, as well as any number of school chums the children had brought home over the years at a moment's notice. Cheever, qua paterfamilias, had always kept an open-door policy: the more at table, the more he liked it. Even Federico—who was living near San Francisco in the days of Harvey Milk; who had several gay friends and thought it was sort of cool (for his friends) to be gay—never suspected a thing.

  As for Max, he wasn't quite sure what to think, though he hoped his affable façade was working, more or less, and he was especially careful to be courteous to Cheever's wife. “Mary, Mary, Mary,” he wrote in his journal; “how difficult it is to be alone with you, eating your pea soup at the table, when our knowledge of one another has such terrible foundations of deceit—and it is raw deceit in spite of any sophistication.” Did Mary know? If so, she never let on, though perhaps she found other ways to express her frustration—like the time she flew into a rage when Max, weeding the stairs leading to the driveway, unwittingly picked some sedum she'd planted. And yet Cheever himself seemed nonchalant about things, and Max “took [his] cues” from Cheever:

  If he thought it was okay to parade me in front of Mary and his children, then I guess it was okay. The fact that I didn't feel okay doing it was my problem. … Obviously it's what people in the East do, the way he takes it in stride. Sitting down at the dinner table with his family, an hour after I've given him a hand-job and he still has stains in his corduroys from it, I guess this is okay here. It's tearing my guts out, but Ben's being nice to me, and Susie—who should take a fucking plate and bust it over my head—and poor Mary, you know.

  One way Cheever justified things was to remind himself that he'd spent much of his adult life in a state of relative self-denial, supporting his family (and often his brother's family) by grinding out stories for The New Yorker, and what had he gotten in return? Bilked by the magazine and rejected by his wife and even his children at times (the fact that he'd often behaved abominably was all but lost on him in his worst moods of self-pity). “I have courted these responsibilities,” he wrote, “but now it seems that they have eclipsed my truly carefree nature and lying in the arms of Procrustes … I feel a marvelous sweetness of freedom.”

  As for the “you sweet thing” episode: Max had been driving home from Ossining—drunk (“being with [Cheever] always included getting drunk”), desperately depressed—and had picked up a young hitchhiker, who put a hand on Max's inner thigh. “And I figured, okay,” Max remembered, “let's see if this is something I really like. Let's see if it's just Cheever's age and the fact that I never had a say in it.” Telling Ben was a tentative way to unburden himself and clear the air, though nothing much changed. Ben kept his own counsel and remained as nice as ever; Susan “sometimes had a flicker of wondering” but finally dismissed it (“I think the violent ups and downs of my father's life had exhausted all of us”). Meanwhile Max went on playing his role, whatever that was, always wondering what the Cheevers really thought of him. The slightest hint of rejection cast him into a panic of self-loathing, such as the time Susan seemed to shrink from a friendly kiss: “[W]hat child no matter how sophisticated wants to complicate his or her life with a kiss on the cheek from her father's homosexual lover,” Max wrote in his journal. “Ben is lovely to me and by the end of dinner I find that I am being restored to some identity of my own, something other than that awkward manifestation of their father's sexual preferences.” When, at the end of the evening, Susan crossed the room to kiss Max goodbye (“she knows, beyond doubt, what she is doing”), he felt almost pathetically grateful.

  THAT SPRING Cheever had struck up a far less complicated friendship with Tom Smallwood (not his real name), a former undergraduate at BU. Tom had finished a novel and wanted to show it to Cheever, so he wrote his old teacher a letter mentioning that he'd moved to Manhattan and would love to get together at some point. Cheever replied immediately, and a few days later the two met for the first time in four years at the train station: “Are you Tom?” Cheever was asking another youth when the real Tom tapped him on the shoulder. Cheever apologized, explaining that he'd always been drunk when they'd met in the past.

  Walking to Croton Dam (“the second largest cut-stone mortised structure …”), Cheever put his arm around Tom, who was taken aback and politely pulled away. Cheever let it go, but on the way back he began talking about homosexuality. He had a male lover, he said, and found it very troubling, since his “upbringing” hadn't made it easy for him; his grandfather Aaron had committed suicide (it wasn't clear whether he was linking this to homosexuality per se), and the disgrace was never mentioned in his family. Back at the house, Cheever kept returning to the subject whenever his wife drifted out of earshot. “Perplexed about what sons will think of him,” Tom wrote in his journal afterward. “Masturbates frequently—messy, we agreed. … We gave each other a hug good-bye, which turned into a kiss.” When Tom returned a month or so later, Cheever proposed another walk to the dam, pausing around the halfway point: “When I put my arm around you last time, you seemed repulsed.” Tom explained that he'd only been a little surprised, and Cheever said he wanted to touch the young man's penis. They ducked behind an outcropping a few yards off the path. “I didn't cum,” Tom noted, “but he certainly did. ‘Felt great.’ Seemed quite beholden to me.”

  The two continued to meet now and then for the rest of Cheever's life, and later Tom would look back on the friendship with unadulterated pleasure. Tom wasn't particularly conflicted about his bisexuality—he soon married and started a family—and Cheever seemed easy in his company, more apt to express affection as opposed to lust. The two cuddled and chatted in bed; they hugged and kissed goodbye. Because he knew Cheever to be very affectionate, Tom was bemused by the man's family dynamics. Cheever and his wife lived together like virtual strangers, and in her absence he was both derisive (mocking her high-pitched voice) and a little fearful of her. In spite of this, he affected a kind of disdainful bravado—”Screw them!”—whenever Tom worried about being caught in flagrante at Cedar Lane; however, with respect to his children (who were otherwise included in the dismissal), Cheever expressed remorse over how often they'd seen him at his worst—what a nasty drunk he'd been; all the times he'd promised to stop drinking, or drink less, and failed. Still, it was odd for Tom to observe how formal Cheever was in their presence, this man who loved to be held and kissed. Perhaps the fact that there were no strings attached to his friendship with Tom had something to do with the difference: “I did give him this novel I'd written,” Tom recalled, “and he didn't like it that much, and it was, like, ‘Okay, let's move on.’ I never asked him for anything.”
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br />   Meanwhile, now that Max was financially dependent on Cheever, the question of his writing career had assumed greater urgency, and occasionally Cheever betrayed some slight impatience on that point: “If you would write your fucking homework in as commanding and relaxed a tone as I find in your letter and bring into its closing the pace of a man walking easily—as you walk—to a railway station or a mailbox it would make me happy.” And so Max would mull this over (be commanding and relaxed; conclude with an easy walking pace) while studying, again and again, Cheever's own work—since their common goal was getting Max published in The New Yorker, a trick Cheever had managed 119 times. Then, too, despite his initial enthusiasm for Max's work, Cheever had gradually discovered that his protégé was rather drastically on the wrong track. Besides being “a catalogue of alienations,” Max's earlier stories had reminded Cheever “a little of Beckett”—static, impressionistic—and the fact was, he didn't find Beckett all that interesting. “Our differences seem quite simple,” he wrote Max. “I write the fiction of cause and effect. You do not. But it would please me if you found a use for your extraordinary voice that seemed more universal.”

  Be universal. Don't write like Beckett. Max did his best to follow this advice—anything to get published in The New Yorker—one result of which was a novella titled “The China Doll,” which Max would later describe as “[his] ‘Reunion.’ “ The original “Reunion” is the shortest story in the big red book, a masterpiece of compression. The first and last phrases are “the last time I saw my father,” and in between we are told not a syllable more than we need to know, to wit: Father and son haven't seen each other in three years; the man's secretary replies to the boy's letter; the boy realizes that, whatever happens, he is doomed to resemble his father somewhat. The rest is the reunion itself—a broad, virtuosic rendering of the father's swinishness and the son's quiet, presumably appalled, observation. “It reads like a streak,” Maxwell wrote Cheever in 1962, “and is perfection at every point.” But Max's “Reunion,” alas, is a bloated, derivative mess. In fifty pages or so, the narrator describes a meeting with his disaffected Mormon father, and amid endless exposition about the man's religious scruples (and a lot of stuff about the mother, too) one hears constant, tinny echoes of the master.*

  Whenever Max finished a story—less and less frequently—it would be forwarded to McGrath at The New Yorker, who was quite aware that Cheever was using him “as a reward for Max.” And nobody, of course, was more painfully aware than Max himself: “Poor Chip. I would bring him these stories that I didn't even understand and he'd suggest revisions and I'd make the revisions still not understanding the story or knowing exactly where the revisions went. And then I'd bring them back to him, and the guy would try to get the stories accepted and then have to tell me no.” By then McGrath would have liked few things better than to accept one of Max's stories—he was fond of Max, and never mind getting Cheever off his back—but that required the approval of more than one editor, and the others were less invested. Yet McGrath tried to stay upbeat, at least for Cheever's benefit: “I hope Max Zimmer hasn't been overly discouraged by this series of revisions. My belief in his work remains unaltered, and I think he's getting better and better.” Sustained (if bewildered) by such encouragement, Max decided to get out of Dobbs Ferry and take a cheap winter rental in Southampton—to hole up and write, by God—coaxing a couple of his more devoted students from Oswego to take a year off and join him.

  Two days after Max's departure in early September, his bereft mentor flew to New Hampshire to accept the Edward MacDowell Medal for “outstanding contribution to the arts,” an award that was annually rotated among writers, visual artists, and composers. After a long and eloquent introduction from Elizabeth Hardwick, Cheever produced some “notes scribbled on the back of a shopping list” (so the Times observed), which mostly had to do with his present sorrow:

  The day before yesterday I was saying goodbye to a very dear friend and as I watched him go away it was only, I think, through my grasp of fiction, through narrative and through invention that I could first reproach myself for loving him excessively and then attack psychiatry for having added the element of prudence to love—and then to have concluded that imprudence is a synonym for love, a conclusion I could not have reached were I not an author of fiction.

  A rather imprudent confession, or so it looks on paper, though doubtless Cheever's mandarin persona had a beguiling effect on his listeners; in any event, nobody seemed to read much into it. But Cheever was not quite done confessing. The chairman of the award committee was his great admirer John Leonard, who spotted the guest of honor “slipp[ing] away” from a dance that night; he found the man sitting alone in his room, sipping some instant coffee he'd packed for the trip. At first Cheever tried to be charming, but he couldn't conceal his melancholy. “Sex is very important to me,” he said, “and there is no sex in my marriage.” Perhaps Leonard could find him an apartment in New York? Something in the East Sixties? His loneliness at home was simply unbearable … and so on, most of the night. For Leonard it was “terribly painful” to learn that his favorite writer, such a radiant artist, was one of the saddest people he'd ever met. Cheever would not have disagreed: “I wake this morning feeling how painful is my life,” he wrote, “when I can, offhand, think of no one who leads a life with less pain.”

  *”You ask if I have ever wavered in my vocation,” Cheever wrote Kaplan on July 23, 1978. “I can think of nothing that I have undertaken—my marriage, my ascent of the Grande Sora, my romances, my parenthood, my citizenship—in which I have not wavered continuously. That's what makes it so thrilling.”

  * The whole strange saga was related in the New York Times (November 30, 1980, page WC3). The identity of the victim was unknown at the time.

  * As I mention in the footnote on page 290, when Cheever refers to intercourse (in whatever terms) with a man, he does not mean anal intercourse but rather any activity resulting in orgasm.

  * Random examples: “the last time I saw my father” is the last line of Max's first paragraph; the father's aroma is evoked as his “sour and ambrosial odor as a male” (“the rankness of a mature male” in Cheever); the son calls his father a “son of a bitch”—twice, triumphantly—the same way Mrs. Henlein, the babysitter, ticks off Mr. Lawton in “The Sorrows of Gin.” Max would concede this and more—indeed, this was his point in showing me the story in the first place: “It was written by a guy out fishing for his voice by trying on everyone else's,” he wrote me. “The first line, in fact, is a direct steal from Updike.” Updike, after all, was another successful New Yorker writer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  {1979-1980}

  CHEEVER'S FAME continued to grow in ways that might otherwise have been gratifying. In October, three adaptations of his stories were broadcast on consecutive Wednesdays as part of the PBS series Great Performances. Over the past year, Cheever had completed a problematic draft of his teleplay—now called Kidnapping in Shady Hill—but the project was in limbo while WNET sought financing; in the meantime Cheever had dreaded the adaptations (“God have mercy on us all”), a dread he conveyed in the press as a kind of lofty skepticism (“Any confrontation between the camera and the word is unhappy”). Such was Cheever's prestige, however, that the underfunded project had attracted a first-rate pool of talent: Wendy Wasserstein adapted “The Sorrows of Gin,” starring Edward Herrmann and Sigourney Weaver; “O Youth and Beauty!” was adapted by A. R. Gurney, and starred Michael Murphy; and “The Five-Forty-Eight”—arguably the most successful of the three—was adapted by Terence McNally, directed by James Ivory, and starred Laurence Luckinbill and Mary Beth Hurt. Cheever was rather impressed in spite of himself (though he deplored the “scored music”), and even agreed to give publicity interviews in New York.

  The programs might have served as a further reminder that Cheever owed much of his present distinction to stories he'd written many years ago, and whether he was still capable of working at that level was
more than a little in doubt. He had almost nothing to show for the three and a half years since finishing Falconer, though he always told interviewers he was hard at work on “another bulky book.” There was no book. “I seem unable to approach a frame of mind in which I can work,” he'd mused around the time of his Pulitzer, and now work had gotten even harder, he claimed, without cigarettes. But finally he managed to write his first story in four years, “The Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat,” quite possibly the worst thing he ever published. “That was the year everybody went to China if they hadn't already been there,” the story opens with deliberate self-parody (rather like his preceding story, “The President of the Argentine,” and perhaps in the same mood of pre-emptive apology). “All the women wore black, ankle-length mink coats and the men wore massive gold wrist-watches with golden bands.” The ensuing anecdote was based on an actual episode in which Mary had gotten the wrong mink coat while leaving a formal affair, then returned and exchanged it for the right one: The end. “It's a very silly story,” said Mary, who reluctantly submitted it to Westchester Magazine, where she'd been hired as fiction editor. The hope was that—as Mrs. John Cheever—she'd attract “important” fiction and maybe even an original Cheever story, though Mary herself wanted to submit work from her adult-education class. “John was just cross that I was interested in other people's stories,” she recalled, and for that reason (somewhat in jest) he'd submitted the “Mink” story under his old pseudonym, Mrs. Louisa Spingarn. Westchester rejected it (“They thought it was terrible”), and the editors may or may not have noticed when the same story appeared in The New Yorker a few months later. Such was Cheever's prestige.