Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  But more and more he seemed to know better. When his niece Jane Carr sent him a note with a comforting quote from scripture, he took to calling her every so often, mentioning at one point that Fred had died instantly (“what a gift that was”), whereas he himself had to endure this endless agony. Chatting with Hope Lange's brother, David—who owed much of his present sobriety to Cheever—he joked about the hats he wore to cover his baldness, then abruptly became somber: “You know, I can't joke with you,” he said. “I only have a few months to live.” Lange asked if he'd considered drinking again, and Cheever said no: “When I do [die], I want it to be with dignity.” But it was one thing to unburden himself with faraway friends and relations, another to do so with his immediate family, toward whom he maintained a hopeful, humorous façade almost to the end (mixed with pardonable moments of sarcasm or petulance). As much as possible they responded in kind, lest they betray an awful despair toward the whole ghastly ordeal. “[T]here's never a word from the god damn doctors about life or death,” Susan wrote Elizabeth Spencer in April—”all they talk about are the miracles of modern medicine and the wonderful thing they are going to try next.” Indeed, certain oncologists were not only disingenuous but patronizing: the same doctor who'd told Cheever he had a “fifty-fifty chance” commented to another doctor, in Cheever's presence, that “anything we do from this point on will be palliative”—as if “palliative” were esoteric medical jargon.

  “What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind,” Cheever noted, prior to preparing his remarks for the American Book Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall on April 27, when he would become the fifteenth recipient of the National Medal for Literature.* Cheever's colleagues—remembering the jaunty man who walked with a quick, seafaring swagger—were aghast at what cancer and its treatment had wrought: wearing a sheepskin cap on his bald head, shrunken into his overcoat, Cheever hobbled along leaning on his wife and a cane—looking, as Max observed, “as though he [were] more in pain from the impression of being lame than of being lame itself.” Otherwise he seemed in a fine humor. “Ah, Bill, just tell them I'm short,” he quipped to William Styron, when he noticed the two-page panegyric the man had written, which did in fact prove a little on the mawkish side. “In his stories and in his novels,” said Styron, “in prose often as sweet and limpid as Mozart but quietly and triumphantly his own, he has told us many things about America in this century: about the untidy lives lived in tidy households, about betrayal and deception and lust and the wounds of the heart, but also about faith and the blessings of simple companionship and the abiding reality of love. …” Styron went on like that, then turned to his subject (who'd let go of his cane to cover his ears) and concluded, “You are a lord of the language.” In the past, Cheever's remarks on these occasions had always been witty, self-deflating, and barely audible, and after that introduction he might have wished he'd taken such an approach this time, too—but this was his “Exodus,” after all, and he was entitled to a certain gravitas. “For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain,” he said, almost stentorian, startling those who'd gasped at his frailty when he first appeared on stage. “A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle. … A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” Exiting to explosive applause, Cheever tottered into an otherwise empty hall and was embraced by his eighty-three-year-old mentor, Malcolm Cowley “It was more than fifty years since John first appeared in my office at the New Republic,” Cowley remembered. “John was now older than I and was leading the way.”

  AND STILL CHEEVER had days when he seemed quite certain he'd survive, almost as if it were a kind of mischievous secret. When Gurganus visited for the last time, in May, Cheever met him at the train station in apparent high spirits, and though he took a long time on the stairs (“Usually he sort of skipped up and down them like a boy in loafers”), his deliberation seemed rather graceful. But he soon grew tired, and rather than walk along the aqueduct as usual, the two sat on the porch while Cheever spoke of his dogs’ private lives (“Maisie sneaks off in the night and does sad and unspeakable acts with railroad mongrels, but we are not to know”). Back at the station, Gurganus said, “I guess I won't be seeing you again”—then added in a rush, as Cheever's smile died, “until I leave for Yaddo.”

  It was spring, the dam was in spate, and Cheever's reluctance to leave the world was keener than ever. “Oh, I wish I were walking across a field in Ireland!” he sighed, while he and Mary watched a movie about Parnell and Kitty O'Shea; seeing the lovers walk among flowers had made him “want to live so.” But gradually he let things go. “I expect we'll renew our connection later,” he wrote in a farewell note to Bellow (having always claimed that they'd met in some other life, and hence didn't need to spend a lot of time together in this one). There was a strong sense of parting, too, in his last meeting with Tom Smallwood. Leafing through an old journal he'd written in Italy, Cheever said, “You might find this interesting”—indicating a passage where he'd described (tormentedly as ever) his arousal at the sight of a handsome soccer player: this, he seemed to suggest, had been part of his life for a very long time. Finally, saying goodbye, he urged Tom to start a family of his own someday, as that was by far the most important aspect of any man's happiness. (Years later, when Tom was reading excerpts from Cheever's journal in The New Yorker, he noticed that one of the last entries was about himself: “He [Tom] is a pleasant young man about whose way of life, whose friends, I know nothing and can imagine nothing.” “I really regretted that,” said Tom, “because I realized I didn't tell him that much about me, because I was so careful to have that relationship exist out of time and out of place. But I adored him, and I miss him a lot. I wish he'd lived and could see the life I live now, because I think he'd be very happy for me.”)

  Cheever rapidly weakened during the last weeks of his life. “For the first time in forty years I have failed to keep this journal with any care,” he wrote. “I am sick. That seems to be my only message.” He found himself tiring with “freakish ease” and always felt cold; during a four-hour blood transfusion, he asked Max to hold his hand (“as cold, at first, as any hand I have held”), which gradually warmed as the fresh blood began to circulate. But soon Cheever was beyond such help. He was so exhausted he couldn't bring himself to wind his Rolex (that, too, was Max's job), and when old friends visited, Cheever seemed torn between begging them to stay, lest he never lay eyes on them again, and simply relapsing into blessed oblivion. The last lines of his journal were written in mid-or late May, when he could just muster the strength, still, to drive a guest to the train station:

  I have never known anything like this fatigue. I feel it in the middle of dinner. We have a guest to be driven to the train, and I begin to count the number of times it takes him to empty his dessert plate with a spoon. There is his coffee to finish, but happily he has taken a small cup. Even before this is empty I have him on his feet for the train. It will be for me, I know, twenty-eight steps from the table to the car, and, after he has been abandoned at the station, another twenty-eight steps from the car to my room, where I tear off my clothes, leave them in a heap on the floor, turn out the light, and fall into bed.

  His friendship with Max did not become any less complicated. “I have been your Sancho Panza,” Max wrote in his journal on May 3, “and I have to stop doing this if I am to get over my longing for your death.” Around this time he began seeing a therapist. At first he discussed the fact that he wasn't able to write anymore, and when the therapist asked how he'd managed to support himself, Max mentioned Cheever—circling back, at last, to a moment at the Lake City Motel in 1977, and painfully working his way forward. At some point he began talking about Mary—how ashamed he felt whenever he kissed her. “That was the moment I started crying.”

  Cheever's ow
n remorse, by then, had mostly to do with his children. He felt particularly obliged to confess things to Ben, who, as a boy, had been the main victim of his self-loathing. “My reluctance to describe to [Ben] my sexual conduct originates in part in my own intolerance,” Cheever had written back in November, having spent the previous two years or so talking around the issue of his “difficult propensities.” In May, when Ben and Janet were about to leave for a belated honeymoon, Cheever asked if he could speak with his son's therapist in the meantime; when Ben returned from his trip, however, he found that the woman hadn't been contacted. Finally, less than two weeks before his death, Cheever phoned his son at work. “The conversation was brief,” Ben remembered in the Letters.

  … He explained that he hadn't been to see my therapist. This, he said, was “partly because I was busy and partly because I didn't see why I couldn't tell you what I had to tell you face-to-face.” He hadn't been busy, he'd been sick, but we both honored this fiction. “What I wanted to tell you,” he said, “is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I'd tell you that, because sooner or later somebody's going to tell you and I'd just as soon it came from me.” …

  I was forgiving, but mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost in a whisper: “I don't mind, Daddy, if you don't mind.”

  • • •

  TOWARD THE END, after many years, Cheever moved back into the master bedroom with Mary, who devoted almost every waking moment to his care. She cooked three meals a day whether he could eat them or not, and would sometimes crouch over him in bed and shout a little fearfully—“John! John!”—when he wouldn't wake up. Once, she stepped outside just long enough to get the mail and check on her garden, and when she came back he was groaning on the floor. While staggering to the bathroom, he'd fallen and broken his leg. With the help of a neighbor, Mary got him back on the bed; then a hospice nurse was summoned to clean him up, put his leg in a splint, and keep him out of pain for the few days he had left. He rarely regained consciousness. One of his last visitors was Don Ettlinger, who found his friend in a fetal position, wizened and comatose (“To see that vital, brilliant, charming man reduced to this was awful, awful”). The nurse asked how long they'd known each other, and Ettlinger murmured, “Forty years,” with a touch of wonder at how fast the time had gone by.

  Cheever died late in the afternoon on June 18. Susan remembered a peculiar burning odor in the master bedroom—hard to describe, except that it gave her a sense of impending death. When Mary remarked that Federico was about to leave for a ten-day rafting trip in California, Susan called him and burst into tears; he was in the middle of packing, but arranged to take the first flight to New York. Susan then phoned Reverend George Arndt at Trinity Church in Ossining: “I don't think your father wants me,” said Arndt, who'd been sent away once before, angrily, since Cheever wasn't ready yet and despised the man besides. Sure enough, he began thrashing when he noticed Arndt standing there in his white robe; Mary, Ben, and Susan joined hands around the bed, reciting the Lord's Prayer, while the priest administered last rites. “[Cheever] was struggling, whether for breath or what, I don't know,” Arndt remembered. “He was in physical turmoil. I made the sign of the cross on his forehead and he became absolutely peaceful and took one last breath and that was it.” Susan had turned around to give her daughter a bottle, and when she turned back, her father was gone (“like he'd left the room and shut the door”). A shriveled corpse remained. Ben tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then put his arms around the body, with the others, and began to cry.

  When the coroner asked the family to leave the room, they refused. Mary went to the closet and picked out her husband's clothes for the funeral: his favorite gray suit with the Academy badge in the buttonhole, a blue shirt, and a pink-and-gray-striped necktie that Alwyn Lee's widow, Essie, had knitted for him. “I just saw him on the Cavett show,” the coroner mumbled as he worked. “Gee, it must have been a rerun.” Meanwhile, in Bronxville, Dr. Robert Schneider—the young oncologist who'd forbidden Cheever to drink again—was playing with his three-year-old son when a stream of sunlight gushed into the room and he felt so weak he had to lie down. “I thought something bad had happened to someone, I wasn't sure who. Then Mary called and said John had passed. We had a bond. There are people in your life and you're glad they were part of your life.”

  * With Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

  * Previous recipients included Nabokov, Auden, Welty, Edmund Wilson, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell.

  EPILOGUE

  CHEEVER DIED almost at the pinnacle of his fame, and would have been delighted by all the posthumous applause. “Front page, Edgar!” he used to badger his barking dog, when the subject of his own obituary came up. “Front page!” The front page is what he got, almost everywhere that mattered. “JOHN CHEEVER IS DEAD AT 70,” proclaimed Michiko Kakutani's generous Times obituary; “NOVELIST WON PULITZER PRIZE.“ Cheever's reputation as “a kind of American Chekhov” was duly noted, the big themes of his work were all explored at gratifying length, and a few favorite pensées of the author (qua public figure) were quoted in full: “It seems to me that man's inclination toward light, toward brightness, is very near botanical. … It seems to me to be that one's total experience is the drive toward light—spiritual light. …”

  Indeed, it was this Cheever—”A Celebrant of Sunlight,” as Time hailed him—who received by far the most attention, and never mind that the man and his work were often quite gloomy. The Boston Globe mourned Cheever with not only a front-page obituary, but also a fine homage on the editorial page that was intended to fix his fame for all time as both a marvelous writer and a “good and generous man”: “Greater authors there are than Cheever, but painfully few of whose work it can be so emphatically said: It delighted us. … In a world of Calibans, John Cheever was pure Prospero: He, too, bestowed magic.” Even the reclusive William Shawn (whom Cheever always suspected of having it in for him) came forth to praise Cheever as “one of the country's great literary figures of the last fifty years … humane, warmhearted, and brilliant.” Perhaps most poignant was a tribute in the Quincy Patriot Ledger, which delicately alluded to the author's wayward past: “John Cheever's death Friday at 70 leaves a gap that it would take a very special person to fill—a youngster with a love of writing and the courage to pursue it until maturity brings a mastery of prose and, finally, of personal failings.” On the South Shore, at least, neither his courage nor his personal failings were forgotten.*

  And to the South Shore he returned at last, for lack of any desirable alternative. Cheever himself used to tell his family to bury him in the backyard, but they couldn't bring themselves to consider the matter until the very end, by which time Cheever was in no condition to say whether that was still his wish. Fortunately, his niece Jane had an appealing solution. Long ago the family had bought a plot in the Nor-well Center cemetery, about fifteen miles from where Cheever was born, and a space remained available beside his parents—an eternal proximity that might have given him pause, though it seemed preferable to some obscure spot in Queens. Federico, who'd never set foot on the South Shore until his father's funeral, said, “It was the last place in the world he would have wanted to be buried.” And yet it's just possible that Cheever might have decided, after all, that death was precisely the right time to go home again. “Nothing seems as genuine and vital to me as the life of the family I have left,” he'd reflected back in 1940. “Living in New York I've seen people grow old and buildings torn down, I've seen women cry and funeral processions but when I try to recall the way people live and die I think of my mother and my father and the people who live on our street.”

  June 22 was a lovely day in Norwell—a “very clear, vertical, Cheever day,” as Gurganus put it. The North River sparkled through the trees, their leaves fluttering in a light wind. Perhaps forty people gathered in the pews of the First Parish Church, many of them the same l
ocal gentry who'd attended Fred's funeral six years before (“the world into whose umbrella stands my brother used to piss,” said Cheever, who'd done much the same thing in a figurative sense). The family entered the church with Updike, the eulogist, and a clamor of creaking wood and clicking cameras was heard from the choir loft, where the press had been crammed. Next came Cheever's almost child-sized, flag-draped coffin, and finally Max arrived, late and a little dazed, whereupon the family insistently made room in their pew.* The three children spoke first. Susan, who didn't feel up to making personal remarks, gave a short reading from Romans (“For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels … shall be able to separate us from the love of God”); Ben read Leander's advice to his sons from The Wapshot Chronicle, and told of how his father had once taught him to use ear wax to oil the joints of a fishing rod. Federico—all the more grieved for having come back too late to say a proper goodbye—reminisced as follows:

  He was forty-five when I was born, an old man nearing the end of his journey, as he said for the last twenty-five years of his life. … When I would return home from school after some athletic fiasco or other he would tell me ‘Fred, remember you are a Cheever.’ I would ask what that meant and he would say ‘It means knowing who you are.’ … What I have discovered is that part of what I am is John Cheever.