Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  “My wife's detestation of me seems at a high point,” Cheever observed around the time of his penultimate New Yorker appearance. What passed for discourse between the two were curt rejoinders on Mary's part whenever Cheever attempted (disingenuously, she thought) to break the silence between them, though generally she tended to be as oblique as possible in expressing hostility (“This cookbook is a pack of lies!” she declared of a cookbook he'd given her), since she'd long ago despaired of any sort of fruitful remonstrance. According to Cheever's journal, “six months or even longer” had gone by until, one night, she ventured to speak to him directly at the dinner table, and then afterward—miraculously—sat “for a minute or two” on the same sofa where he himself was sitting: “This has not happened for years. … She does not actually sit beside me but she does sit near me in order to say that a book, given to me, is in her bedroom and that I am free to read this during the daylight hours. I thank her and we part. This is my union.”

  At the same time, he was finding less solace in his friendship with Max, who returned from Southampton in May 1980 and took a basement apartment with his girlfriend in Westchester. His time on Long Island had not been a success: he was now so blocked that he could hardly finish a paragraph, much less a story, and the ramifications had left him “frightened witless.” He felt utterly at Cheever's mercy. Fast approaching middle age, he'd burned his bridges in the hope of becoming a writer—a New Yorker writer—and without Cheever's sponsorship it was a far-fetched prospect, to say the least. Plus he had to eat. Working as an occasional factotum on Cedar Lane—feeding dogs, watering plants, other more sordid chores—Max had begun to grate a little on his master's nerves, since Cheever could no longer quite persuade himself that his protégé's affection was disinterested. He longed, however, not to succumb to “meanness of spirit” (the essence of which was, as he put it, “I don't want to play with you because you don't really love me”), but amid other frustrations it was a lot to ask. “Oh Max fuck off,” he snapped one day, when Max was drinking too much Scotch (increasingly the case, for his host all but demanded it), and Cheever, meanwhile, had been waiting for a load of firewood to be delivered so he could leave for the airport. Around dusk, the wood finally arrived and the man began unloading it, but Cheever stopped him and said he wanted to inspect it first. As Max recorded the scene in his journal:

  “Green,” [Cheever] said. “You can't sell me green wood.” “It's not green. … It's been seasoned a year.” … “It's green. Don't come here under cover of darkness and tell me it's not green. Get out of here.” “Well, you motherfucker,” yells the woodman. “You goddamn little cocksucker.” … Then I realize that I am stunned from drinking Scotch and from being told to fuck off and from hearing the woodman cuss out Cheever.

  Max jumped to work on the woodpile, praying that Cheever would “like [him] again” when it was all over. As he remembered twenty-five years later, “I thought, ‘Now I've done it. Now he's going to finish me.’ “ As a matter of fact, some such thought had occurred to Cheever, albeit in less portentous terms: “I think that I must say goodbye to Max,” he wrote shortly after the firewood episode. “We could not live together unless we had some simple occupation such as cycling fifty miles a day. This we have already done and he, as a young man, cannot make a life of bicycling.”

  • • •

  CONDUCTING AT LEAST TWO gay relationships under the noses of his wife and children did not make Cheever more tolerant or comprehending toward those who presumed to do likewise. One day he felt so tormented that he confided something of the truth to an old Signal Corps buddy, whom he'd met for lunch in New York every so often for three decades. “What's the big deal?” the man said, meaning to console Cheever. “I like to get my cock sucked, too, now and then.” Cheever looked back on the moment with lingering wonder: “When [he] told me that he liked having his cock sucked I decided, before he had completed the sentence, that I would never see him again as a friend and I never did.” (His friend accepted Cheever's excuse that he could no longer bear to be in the city without wanting to drink.) But this was a mild shock compared with what was coming from another, even closer Signal Corps friend. “We dined with the Ettlingers about a month ago and it was like stepping into the crucial chapters of some extraordinary success story,” Cheever had written in 1962. “They are all rich, happy, well-fed, well-staffed, well-dressed and enthusiastically at peace with the world. Don loves his program [Love of Life]. Katrina loves Don. The dogs and cats lie in one another's arms amongst the roses.” So it seemed, and perhaps so it was. In any case, Cheever had fallen out of touch with Ettlinger during the worst of his alcoholism, but in recent years the two had resumed meeting almost weekly at a diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, where each would bring the other updates about children, grandchildren, and wives. Then one spring day in 1980, as they were saying goodbye in the parking lot, Ettlinger announced that he was bisexual. “I've had hundreds of one night stands in the New York apartment,” he said, or so the horrified Cheever recorded in his journal.

  Ettlinger rarely denied the truth to his gay friends (or to himself, for that matter), and his marriage seems to have remained stable in a way Cheever's never was. Katrina once remarked to her husband, as they were pulling into the driveway of their home in Rockland County, “You know, you have this whole other life, and it has to do with men.” Such a moment was surprising enough for Ettlinger to mention it to a friend, who claimed that homosexuality “wasn't an open issue” between the couple otherwise. Arthur Laurents—another gay Signal Corps friend—had been close to the Ettlingers before their marriage, and was “instrumental” in persuading Don to marry his wealthy, charming girlfriend: “Don and Katrina remind me of a scene I wrote in The Way We Were. Robert Redford broke up with Barbra Streisand and she calls him up: ‘It's because I'm not attractive, isn't it?’ I liked Katrina a lot. Don was too weak—he needed someone strong. Katrina wasn't conventionally attractive, but she was very bright and had a great body. He needed her more than she needed him.” Cheever—with the perspicacity he brought to most areas of life—had sensed the truth about Ettlinger all along, but simply could not summon the dreaded word: “I do not mean to judge him,” he wrote in 1954, “but perhaps I can say that here is a temperament … that cannot be judged by the standards our society has evolved. … There is a breadth here—libertinage or infantilism may be what I mean—that does not in any way diminish the love he bears his wife and his children.”

  But how could such things be? And why had Ettlinger decided, after so many years, to confide in a friend he knew to be homophobic, thereby losing at least “some particle” of his friend's esteem (“I think him to be a revealed narcissist,” Cheever wrote; “something that I think I and my lover not to be”)? It so happened that a mutual acquaintance, the novelist Joseph Caldwell, had suspected Cheever of being bisexual ever since reading “The World of Apples”: “I thought, ‘No straight man would get aroused by the sight of a hairy ass’ “ (as Bas-comb does in the story); then, after reading Falconer, Caldwell was almost convinced. “Is Cheever gay?” he asked Ettlinger, who replied that his old friend was most definitely not (“Anybody else—-James Cagney, whoever—but not Cheever”). And yet Ettlinger was intrigued enough to investigate further—hence his confession in the parking lot. “I got it out of him,” he told Caldwell two weeks later. “He's bisexual all right.” It wasn't information that Cheever had surrendered gladly (“I am not, with Don, disposed to bring in any of my deeper feelings on these matters”), and he continued to squirm at every mention of the subject, especially after Ned Rorem (via Laurents) had enlightened Ettlinger all the more.

  But Ettlinger insisted on discussing it, perhaps because his heart went out to Cheever. “Lunching with my old friend Don leaves me quite confused,” Cheever wrote, a few months before his death. “He claims to regret not having led the life of a homosexual. I find this unimaginable.” By then, however, Ettlinger had managed to make inroads with Cheever, regaling him w
ith stories about the life, or lives, he'd led these many years—one in New York, one in Pomona, and a certain amount of happiness with both. After one such conversation, Cheever reflected, “I think that far from being ashamed of my androgynous nature I shall embrace and if possible enjoy this as a gift rather than an infirmity.”

  “I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH and my endeavors to dismiss this disconcerting love have been highly unsuccessful,” Cheever wrote Max, after a short-lived attempt to distance himself. Indeed, now that the foundering young man was at his beck and call, Cheever began to introduce him to a widening circle of friends and writers—many of whom did arrive at the logical conclusion. Eugene and Clare Thaw noticed an “obvious intimacy” when the friends came over for one of their frequent swims, though it might have surprised Cheever to learn as much, since he was careful to avoid any public displays of affection. As for Max: “I remember meeting Updike once at some party, and I thought, ‘Maybe they don't really know … but, yeah, they know. They know.’ And again, it seemed okay with them. They acted like, ‘Yeah, so you play with Cheever's cock. It's okay, I've met stranger people.’ The shame was incredible, but I'd put on my good old Mormon-missionary smile and get through it.” Max longed to have friends his own age, to have any “regular friends” period, but above all he wished he could go back to Utah—to a time, that is, before he'd been “swallowed”—so he could rediscover who he'd been and why he'd wanted to write in the first place. At the very least he wanted to get a job, but Cheever insisted he needed the time to write, or anyway to be free at a moment's notice for a trip, a swim, a bicycle ride, a party, or some chore on Cedar Lane.

  In fact (though he now considered it “very unlikely”), Cheever had continued to hope that he could somehow railroad Max into print, if only to improve the man's spirits and confer a certain legitimacy on their relationship. But Max hardly knew where to begin anymore. He looked over the stuff he'd written for Cheever and concluded that he “might as well have spent the last two or so years fishing.” Lunching one day in the Reader's Digest cafeteria, Max admitted his frustration to Ben, who kindly pointed out that his father “[wasn't] that great a teacher”: “Some writers have a flotilla of students who follow them into print, but he's not like that.”* Meanwhile Cheever continued to caution Max about his constant, Beckettesque gloom, insisting he write a story “in which suppuration, corruption and decay do not appear. … [R]emember that George Grosz could paint flowers.” But Max had long since digested such advice and found it wanting, not to say “insidious”: “[I]t might be a wholesale dissimulation for him,” he wrote in his journal, “and one he perpetuates in order to surround the vileness, the evil, the horror of our relationship with a false aura of goodness and virtue and greenery.” Once more it occurred to Max that his work, his very identity, was doomed if he didn't put some distance between himself and his teacher, who at length agreed to cover rent on a studio apartment in Manhattan for Max and his girlfriend. He also put Max in touch with his and Ettlinger's friend Joseph Caldwell, who happened to live right around the corner. One day Max dropped by and showed Caldwell a recent (and perhaps sunnier) story he'd written—remarking, however, that Cheever “wasn't impressed.” Then, almost in tears, he added, “What does Cheever want … ?” “It was the saddest thing,” said Caldwell. “You can't write to please somebody else, and I knew that was the end of Max as a writer. I thought, ‘You poor guy.’ “

  What Cheever wanted, or sometimes thought he wanted, was his own New York apartment—an idea he'd been kicking around for a year or so, even before he'd broached the subject with John Leonard in New Hampshire. No longer would he have to worry (insofar as he worried) about sneaking around his wife and children and neighbors; he could start all over. On the other hand, starting over at age sixty-eight was a terrifying thought. He pictured himself (à la his days on Bay State Road) sitting alone in his apartment, “chain-smoking over [his] third martini,” an elderly homosexual stood up by some young cock or another. And it was essentially a gay lifestyle he'd be leading, since he'd finally come to admit, once and for all, that he and Hope Lange were nothing but good friends. “You don't understand the first thing about women,” she'd been telling him for years, and he'd done little to change her mind. The decisive episode had occurred after a recent lunch when, returning to her apartment, Cheever had dropped his pants and waited. “I can't help you,” she said, and made a phone call. Cheever pulled his pants up, rushed downstairs, bought three dozen roses, and rushed back. Said Max (bleakly familiar with the incident and the basic MO): “It was like, ‘What's wrong? Women like flowers. Now you're supposed to fuck me.’ “ Hope continued to chat on the phone, and presently Cheever got the message and left. The larger message, of course, was that home was where he belonged after all. His wife might not speak to him (much less sleep with him), but she was a warm body and rarely failed to have dinner waiting—”one of the great labors of history,” as Cheever gratefully acknowledged: “She has often served me with bitterness … but night after night for a decade less than half a century she has brought food to the table.”

  Hope's retirement from the scene may have served as a catalyst for Cheever to start work on a novel he'd long been considering about “the erotic loneliness of an old man.” Perhaps the most inhibiting factor had been the issue of bisexuality (“the astonishing iridescence of my nature,” as Cheever liked to say), which if anything had become more momentous in recent years—and yet, another such book after Falconer would be tantamount to a public confession, and Cheever hadn't forgotten by a long shot the way Dennis Coates (for one) had glibly connected the life and work. But then, too, he had an obligation as an artist—a great artist—to be emotionally honest: “What I come on is that I am writing the annals of my time and my life and that any deceit or evasiveness is, by my lights, criminal.” So that settled the point about bisexuality. Still, Cheever was loath to write about erotic matters only, and he cast about for some other, nobler aspect of life that had given comfort over the years, that had reminded him of the “intrinsic largeness of the human spirit” no matter what the sordid facts—which brought him back to nature, of course, and one of his favorite ways of communing with it, skating. Groping to begin, he explained the gist of his novel as follows: “I mean it's about what it's like to fuck a woman and then a man because the woman won't fuck you. But then there's this other thing about turning a lake into a dump so that it can be a softball field for crippled war veterans. I don't know what the two stories have in common. It could of course be the old man's skating pond that they are beginning to destroy.”

  Sometime that summer, at any rate, he got to work on what would become Oh What a Paradise It Seems, but the work went slowly or not at all; the ecstatic high he'd felt while writing Falconer was gone—quite gone—and he often wondered if he was losing not only his creative powers, but his sanity. He'd continued to experience the odd hallucination of Ginny Kahn and a drunken Exley, the latter singing a “forlorn jingle” that Cheever had taken to calling the “Ain't Got Nothing” song; when he tried to pursue the scene further, he'd suffer a memory lapse so profound that he felt utterly lost in time and space (“I [do] not, for a moment, know my wife's name or the name of my dogs”). Along with alcoholic brain damage, he suspected he was suffering from “[what] psychiatrists would call a traumatic rejection”—that is, a kind of hysterical amnesia, cued by the hallucination, at the bottom of which was some “cruelty in [his] youth” so ghastly he couldn't bear to face it. Whatever was happening to him, chemical or otherwise, left him so drained and alienated that he could hardly speak or even smile. “I seem in a contemptible frame of mind and am perhaps ill,” he noted toward the end of September.

  Despite his increasing malaise, he decided to go to Yaddo in October—a trip he viewed “with genuine dread,” though the thought of staying home with a silent, scornful wife was even more intolerable. It would be his last visit. The handful of guests included a sculptor Cheever knew slightly from previous visits, Mary
Ann Unger, as well as the novelist Joan Silber and the composer Lee Hyla—all of them relatively young and respectful toward the legend in their midst. Everyone noticed, however, that Cheever was a little off: he kept losing his train of thought, and took a vicious dislike to one of the guests, a fifty-two-year-old surgeon and writer named Richard Selzer, who (one learns from the journal) had struck Cheever as effeminate. When, at dinner that first night, Cheever learned that the surgeon was married, and moreover had children, he became implacably hostile (“I find him repulsive because he performs the same sexual acrobatics that I, as a terribly old man, am beginning to enjoy”). Affecting to break the ice, Cheever turned to Selzer and asked, “Richard, have you ever plagiarized?” Selzer struggled to keep his dignity: it was his first trip to Yaddo and he was excited about it, all the more so because Cheever, no less, was there. “I let it be known to him that I certainly wanted to be his friend, but no,” the man recalled. “He began an attack in his little bitchy way. And he was good at being a bitch.” When he wasn't putting Selzer in his place, Cheever entertained the table with old Yaddo stories that tended to stress his reputation as a cocksman, what with the many women he'd conquered on the couch in the Great Hall. The next day he was visited by Max (“we watch a ballgame, screw, have dinner, watch another game, and part, at my wish”), who everyone assumed was his lover, said Silber, despite his past exploits in the Great Hall.

  “I'm working like a streak but I don't seem able to end the unreality blues when I leave the typewriter,” Cheever wrote Max on October 12. Two days later, he tauntingly challenged Selzer (a heavy smoker) to join him for a twenty-two-mile bicycle ride around Saratoga Lake; Selzer declined, and Cheever (pleased) departed alone. Exhausted on his return, he nonetheless went to an AA meeting after dinner, then returned to his studio at Hillside Cottage to watch the World Series with Hyla, Silber, and Unger. During the seventh inning, he was chatting with Silber when suddenly he crushed the plastic cup of ginger ale in his hand. “At first I thought it was a joke about how crappy the plastic was,” Silber remembered. “I started to laugh, then I realized something was wrong.” After a long stare, Cheever's hands flew to his throat and he fell over backward, thrashing his legs and making strange gurgling noises.