Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Schulman referred him to Donald Van Gordon in Croton, whose main impression of Cheever was one of total, exhausted surrender: the patient had skipped the denial and anger stages of grief (though he would revert to them later), and seemed melancholy but “kind of relieved,” too, that the end was near; Van Gordon had never encountered a terminally ill patient who put up less resistance. Still, Cheever refused to succumb to an almost constant temptation to drink—”How nice it would be,” he kept saying—nor had he stopped worrying what others thought of him. During his first visit to Van Gordon, Cheever presented the stranger with an inscribed copy of the paperback Stories: “ To Donald Van Gordon, with profound gratitude.”

  Around this time, Cheever and Mary went to the Katonah Library for a reading by Eudora Welty, and while waiting in line they were approached by Dana Gioia, the young man Cheever had met at Stanford several months after Smithers. As Gioia remembered of that final meeting: “[Cheever] looked thin, ashen, and painfully frail … seem[ing] half a century older than the quick, boyish man I had met only six years before.”

  SUBDUED BY ILLNESS, Cheever was capable of taking a more lucid view of his friendship with Max. “I sleep alone and wake to think how much happier things would be for Max if I were not around,” he wrote that summer. With the psychiatrist he discussed the problem almost incessantly: Max wanted to take his girlfriend to Utah and perhaps reconcile with his family; Cheever realized he was “infring[ing]” on these plans, and really, under the circumstances, shouldn't he just let Max go? Finally? Van Gordon replied, sensibly enough, that Max would have to make that decision on his own, though Cheever perceived that “some power of decision” lay in his own hands for reasons that might have been hard to convey to a third party. In the meantime he imagined a jovial parting scene, both him and Max laughing: “Goodbye old man,” Max would say. “It's too bad you never learned to change a tire.”* This, Cheever knew, would be best for all concerned—but when it came to the point, he simply couldn't bear it. “If Max does not call by Thursday,” he wrote, quite aware that Max was avoiding him, “I will call him and ask if he can do the driving next week.”

  “I am going to say goodbye,” Max wrote in his own journal on July 30. “I am for the simple reason that I need to find the will to live again and the instinct for moving forward.” Just over a week before, when Cheever was released from the hospital, he'd insisted that Max come to get him: Mary had an etching lesson, and Ben would be at work (though he'd offered to take the morning off), and Cheever didn't want to disrupt their routines. He also, of course, wanted to have his cake and eat it too, since he was therefore able to seem magnanimous to his family—a genuine impulse, after all—while at the same time enjoying Max's company. “She needed a vacation,” he told Sara Spencer the following week, when Mary left for Treetops. “It was pathetic,” Spencer remembered, indignantly wondering (years later) what kind of wife would skip off to New Hampshire while her husband recovered—alone!—from cancer surgery. But of course Cheever wasn't alone, and (as Max's journal confirms) Mary had offered repeatedly to stay home and nurse him. For his part, Max had little choice except to go to Ossining. He'd set his heart on a trip to Utah at the end of August, but he was broke and money was hard to come by, since Cheever (as he freely admitted by then) was afraid of paying Max too much, lest he leave for good. “I have never, I think, had a more arduous thing to do in exchange for money, and I have been paid so poorly,” Max wrote. “But what is it you do to rebel against an old man who says that being left by you will certainly not kill him but will make his life terribly hard.” And still Cheever longed to do the right thing. He knew Max wanted nothing better than to go back to the city and be with his girlfriend, and to some extent Cheever wanted the same thing: he found the rituals of domesticity with a man—sitting on the porch reading together, chatting over steaks in a restaurant—“painfully awkward;” besides, he could make do as usual in August, going to AA meetings and watching baseball on TV. However: “I mustn't overlook the fact that I have a wayward cock to accommodate and so, I think, does he.”

  One of the drawbacks of lodging on Cedar Lane, for Max, was that he wasn't allowed to smoke; on the other hand, he was constantly encouraged to drink, and now he was also welcome to take as many Percodans as he liked, since Cheever didn't want to get hooked. One night Max took more Percodans than usual. Dr. Schulman was coming to dinner—that is, he and Cheever planned to have a drink at the house, then go to White Plains for dinner—and Cheever had made it clear that Max wasn't invited. As Max was about to clear out, though, Schulman arrived: a short, plump, rather awkward man who put Max in mind of a “very bad Truman Capote.” As it might have seemed rude to leave at that moment, Max joined the two for a drink, but when he rose to refill Cheever's apple juice, Cheever put a hand over his glass and said, a little sharply, “No, Max. You go off and get your dinner.” Flustered, hurt, and somewhat disoriented, Max picked up some takeout chicken and returned to Cedar Lane, but the two were still inside; Max circled around waiting for them to leave, and finally bolted his chicken on the shoulder of Route 134. At length he was able to return to the house and fall into bed, exhausted, but at some point he felt a tugging at his toes. “He's home, he's here,” Cheever said to Edgar; then, to Max, “I hope I didn't seem uncivil to you this evening. It's just that he was such a handful I didn't feel comfortable with both of you here.” Max couldn't get back to sleep after that, because his heart kept “racing, stopping, idling, jumping,” and he worried that he was having a bad reaction to the alcohol and Percodan. First thing in the morning, then, he went to the hospital for an EKG, and was happy to learn that there was nothing wrong with his heart after all.

  Once Cheever felt a little better, and Max had gone, he wrote a note to Tom Smallwood reporting that he was now “well enough to walk to the dam.” The two hadn't met in many months and were delighted to see each other. As usual, they ate a good lunch and then walked along the aqueduct to a familiar outcropping, where Cheever was “rewarded with that vast serenity [he enjoyed] after a huge orgasm”: “These young men, and there have been perhaps ten, who treat my sexual drives rather as if this were a condition of being wounded, have contributed greatly to my life in these last years. Traditionally these are felons, blackmailers and thieves but I have never known such innocence and generosity.” And Tom, at least, regarded it as an even exchange: he didn't care much for the sex (“[I] kind of blocked [it] in my own mind”), but Cheever was marvelous company and loved having a congenial audience (“[Tom] has not heard any of the old, old stories such as that midnight on the Red Arrow express between Leningrad and Moscow when I ordered champagne for everyone on the train”). Crucially, too, Tom knew better than to overstay his welcome, and was generally the first to mention that it was time for him to catch a train back to the city.

  Another nice aspect of the friendship was that Cheever could frankly discuss the gay side of his nature (with Max, the illusion of mutual heterosexuality was more imperative), and indeed, toward the end, he struck Tom as being “almost militant” about “mak[ing] up for lost time.” Which appears to have been no idle pose. For a mortally ill man almost seventy years old, Cheever's libido remained intact to a degree that excites awe and even a trace of envy. A few weeks after his right kidney had been “defenestrated,” Cheever complained of getting aroused “at the smell of bacon,” and was quite willing to drag himself up several flights of stairs to a paid assignation in order to relieve this nagging affliction. And now that such encounters had become commonplace, Cheever seemed more and more bemused at all the fuss he'd made about his “androgynous struggle” over the years; reading old journals, he couldn't help finding the whole saga “hilarious” (“This is quite simply my life”):

  And so at breakfast [he wrote in September] I think of that chapter in my biography that describes how happily, at this time, he cultivated the friendships of several young men. He intended to encourage their literary aspirations, he enjoyed their company on bicycle
trips and long walks and Louise Delshower claims to have encountered them several times in the woods, quite naked and howling loudly with sexual exertions. When cross-questioned he often said: Yes, yes, nothing could be more natural.

  The widowed Helen Barolini, who lived near the aqueduct path, did in fact detect something amiss when—having read Falconer—she kept spotting Cheever walking along with some young man, though she never actually overheard their “exertions” (“I would also like to write about having an ejaculation with [Tom] and shouting loudly: ‘This is journey's end’ “).

  Perhaps because he was more content in that department of his life, Cheever felt all the more beholden to his “venerable marriage,” and wished to make some gesture to that effect. Early that autumn, he approached an architect friend from his Scarborough days, Don Reiman, and hired him to build an addition to the house that would serve as an etching studio for Mary, who'd been taking classes from a local artist and was quite passionate about it. The project cost upward of fifty thousand dollars in a difficult tax year, and while Cheever sometimes groused about wasting money, he always insisted it was something he wanted to do no matter what. Examining this impulse (“[my] gratefulness for Mary's willingness to live with so unstable a husband”), he wrote: “The word ‘dear’ is what I use: ‘How dear you are.’ It is the sense of moving the best of oneself toward another person. I think this was done most happily within my marriage, although I do remember being expelled to sofas in the living room, although not before the years had passed. I do recall the feeling of moving, rather like an avalanche, toward Mary.”

  * Remarking, for example, that he'd been determined to finish his novel “even if [his] prick fell off,” as sometimes seemed likely.

  * I'd very much like to hear Schulman's side of the story, but he died several years ago in a head-on collision.

  * Perhaps an allusion to one of Max's more practical functions on Cedar Lane, since he was an excellent mechanic. But one thinks, too, of that line from “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear”: “Out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if—jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts—we were describing the changing of a flat tire?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  {1981-1982}

  CHEEVER HAD FINISHED a draft of Oh What a Paradise It Seems in June 1981, and, though uncertain of its merit, he was understandably pleased that he'd managed to write it at all. He expected Knopf to be a little disgruntled about the length (one hundred pages in published form), but he'd written the story he meant to write, more or less, and that would have to serve. As it happened, Gottlieb considered the book “beautiful,” though he suspected the ending was too abrupt and suggested that Cheever write a “last movement” that would bring things to a more definite close. As with Bullet Park, Cheever was inclined to concede the point at first, resolving in his journal to make the “last chapter more dense”—but, once again, he seemed to conclude that the essential form of his novel had already been realized, or at any rate he had nothing to add.*

  The other shoe dropped in September, when Cheever received a rather drastic contract amendment from Knopf. As Gottlieb later explained, “We had contracted for a full-length novel, and Oh What a Paradise was hardly that; there was no way it could possibly earn back so huge an advance (huge for the times). I did love it, though, and still do. John's reaction was, I'm afraid, a symptom of his deteriorating condition, something I only came to understand when I was working years later on the Journals.” The amendment called for a second book “approximately 75-100,000 words” (more than twice as long as Paradise), for which Cheever would receive the remaining two hundred thousand dollars of his advance—which is to say, whereas he'd been expected to write one book for five hundred thousand dollars, now he was expected to write two. “Early in the evening I have read, for the first time, the new agreement with Knopf and when I wake at dawn I find myself in a rage,” he wrote. “I remember being underpaid by the New Yorker, I remember being given a check for first-look that turned out to be an advance.”

  Cheever's rage would continue for a few days, then fizzle out. He was tired. Van Gordon, the psychiatrist, remarked on a “quality of wispiness” about him—the way he entered a room so quietly, so diffidently, one hardly knew he was there. Lynn Nesbit, his agent, was likewise struck by his “world-weariness” and wanted very much to cheer him up; to the best of her recollection, she'd offered to show the novel around and see if other publishers would match the original half-million or at least come close—but in the end, after venting his grievance, Cheever decided to stay with Knopf. “I find that I have misread my contract and that the rage and indignation with which I have been racked at dawn for several days was foolishness,” he consoled himself. It's hard to say what Cheever had “misread;” his more businesslike daughter had read the amendment precisely as written and remained furious about it. “My father never would stand up for himself professionally,” she said. “Ever. … And I thought, ‘Enough!’ And I yelled and screamed and carried on, and he signed it. Because he was a patsy.”

  Perhaps, but then Cheever felt obliged to his publisher: his wealth and fame would have been considerably less, after all, if Gottlieb hadn't pressed him to publish the Stories. During a radio interview in 1980, Cheever had been asked if he ever thought about switching publishers: “Why should I do that?” he replied. “Bob Gottlieb has been a wonderful editor. Knopf has done a wonderful job for me. …” Purely by chance, Gottlieb was listening that day.

  AFTER THE CONTRACT DEBACLE, Cheever lost a certain amount of faith in his book—a process that had begun in earnest a month before, when he'd read Updike's Rabbit Is Rich in galleys: “I am delighted,” he noted. “Indeed I am so covetous that I feel faint. But it is, this morning, I truly hope, a genuine sense of how serious an occupation this is.” Eager to do his part for so “important” a novel, Cheever came to the city in October to appear with Updike on The Dick Cavett Show, where he seemed in decent fettle despite breaking his fly zipper just prior to taping (he kept his legs tightly crossed and looked flushed). After so many years of competitiveness (albeit mostly in Cheever's mind), the writers now seemed determined to out-praise each other. “I see [Cheever] do things effortlessly that I couldn't do with a great deal of effort,” said Updike, and Cheever observed, “He is at the peak of his powers while I'm an old man nearing the end of my journey.” At one point Cheever delivered himself of an extravagant paean to Updike's “inestimable” gifts, then chuckled, “Match that one.” “I bet you wish you had Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal back on the show,” said Updike. Indeed, the only hint of discord arose when Cheever allowed that he didn't—as Updike did—write much in the way of explicit sex scenes: “I do think the emphasis on our erotic life has always seemed questionable,” he solemnly averred, adding a few days later (in a letter to Weaver) that Updike had “described erections so exhaustively that he's beginning to look like a big prick with a hair-piece.”

  No matter. The writers were resolving their sometimes murky association in a mood of almost perfect rapport. A month later, Updike wrote that he'd “read at a gulp” Oh What a Paradise It Seems and found it full of “brimming magic,” whereupon Cheever replied that he'd meant to attach a cover letter to the galleys noting how “unenthusias-tic” he was about the book, in light of which Updike's praise was all the more “overwhelming.” As for the Cavett show, Cheever had watched it alone in his kitchen the night before and deemed Updike “comely,” whereas he himself “looked rather like a viper who was trying to break wind.”

  Meanwhile PBS had finally managed to get American Playhouse off the ground, and The Shady Hill Kidnapping was scheduled to air on January 12, 1982, as the premiere offering of “the most ambitious and expensive single series in the history of public television,” according to the Times. Three years ago, Cheever had gotten excited about the project when a reading of his teleplay was performed at t
he Public Theater by such notable actors as Kevin McCarthy, Maria Tucci, and Tammy Grimes (the last in the role Cheever was holding open for Hope Lange: “Hope is out on the coast,” he wrote at the time, “playing the mother of a demented child in a two-part TV film”). Over time, though, he'd come to realize his script needed a lot of work—the PBS adaptations of his stories had been edifying in that respect—and when money suddenly became available in early 1981, Cheever was wide open to suggestions. His main collaborator was the director Paul Bogart (of All in the Family fame), who showed Cheever how to cut his teleplay by almost an hour and a half. Fortunately, this was easy to do. The “mysterious and oracular Bogart,” as Cheever called him, pointed out that all the long descriptive bits would have to go, or else be converted to dialogue, ditto the “very peculiar” set pieces that seemed to bear little relation to the story proper.* But Cheever held firm on the five Elixircol commercials he'd written into the script, insisting rather absurdly that they played an “integral part” in the drama; in fact, he'd appropriated two of them almost word for word from “The Death of Justina,” doubtless for the simple and sufficient reason that they delighted him.

  He was not mistaken on that point: the commercials were by far the most entertaining part of the show. “The Surgeon General says that Elixircol has caused cancer in certain laboratory animals,” intones a louchely preserved Celeste Holm. “But who ever heard of the Surgeon General? Does he ever get asked anywhere? … Who wants to heed the warnings of a nonentity? Forget the Surgeon General.” The tenor of these commercials harked back to a time when Cheever was at the height of his powers, driven to brilliance by (among other things) his indignation over a collective tendency to deny one's mortality in the midst of the nuclear age. But even at his most caustically satirical, there was always a softer, more wistful side to Cheever, a side that wanted to “cheer himself up,” as Alfred Kazin had perceived. It is this side of Cheever—the glib transcendentalist—who wrote The Shady Hill Kidnapping. “What a paradise, what a kingdom it is!” exults his protagonist, Charlie Wooster (played by George Grizzard), as he sits in his backyard gazing out at a verdant suburbia. Nor is there any trace of irony here—caustic, wistful, or otherwise. Life is a paradise (particularly among the genteel middle class), or rather potentially, if only we can be a bit more mindful of just how precious we are to one another. The members of Wooster's winsome family are brought to this realization by the supposed kidnapping of Charlie's grandson, Toby, who wanders off for the day. This also serves as the premise for some broad-as-a-barn satire about the evils of bureaucracy: In order to pique the interest of an indifferent police department, Charlie's son Bob decides to drop a phony ransom note in the City Hall suggestion box; then a stuffy banker informs Charlie that he cannot receive a loan for the ransom unless he first agrees to build a swimming pool as “entrepreneurial collateral.” And so on. As for the discontents of suburbia, they are touched on, lightly, by a kooky matron who entertains Toby while the community pursues its frenzied, oblivious search for the boy: “I have a nice husband, two beautiful children. We have so many consumer goods that we have a garage sale every autumn. But I terribly want something more. Guess that's why I like the thought of being in outer space. I'm so lonely I think there must be someone out there for me. I want to be kissed by a passing star.”† This while Toby—too young to comprehend the spiritual bankruptcy of a materialistic society—cutely watches the skies.