Cheever

by Blake Bailey

Finally Updike rose amid a further racket of picture-taking. “America will miss him, the leading fabulist of his generation,” he began, while the congregation shot bitter looks at the choir loft. “His swift rich style never rested to belabor the obvious or to preen,” Updike continued, and went on to say many other kind and necessary things, until he made a personal observation that may or may not have surprised those Norwell mourners with their “sailboat tans, white hair and mannered wives”: “I saw a lot of him only on two extended occasions: in Boston in the mid-seventies and in Russia in 1964. It was in Russia, strange to say, that he seemed happier and more at home.”

  There was a lighter side to the proceedings, as Cheever might have wished. When Ben's wife began to sniffle, Mary (who'd chosen to forgo the usual widow's weeds in favor of a cheerful beige suit and straw hat) remarked, “She cries easily, doesn't she?” Then, as the pallbearers followed the hearse across River Street toward the cemetery, the car gained speed and made them break into a staggering trot. “And I wonder whether you saw one touch that was absolutely out of a story by John,” observed one of the few writers present, John Hersey, in a subsequent letter to Mary. “While the graveside prayers were being read, a group went over the crest of the hill in the graveyard, and suddenly a teenage boy, overcome with mysterious exuberance, suddenly tossed off a couple of cartwheels.”

  The last guest to leave was Gurganus, who sat with his back against a headstone and watched the gravediggers finish their work. He'd heard of Cheever's death on the radio while dressing for breakfast at Yaddo (“In his home in Ossining, New York, beloved novelist and story writer John Cheever succumbed …”), and downstairs he found a letter waiting on the mail table: “Dear Allan, Please call or come at once. Something I must tell you. Love J.” Sitting in the cemetery, Gurganus kept his eye on a particular gravedigger—a gorgeous, strapping, shirtless boy out of a Thomas Eakins painting—which seemed a suitable way to commune with the dead. “I still find myself suspecting that John actually escaped in some way or other,” he wrote a friend. “The baldness of mortality had never registered more graphically for me—than the sight of the decent box going under.”

  THE OSSINING SERVICE on June 23 was larger (about two hundred mourners, according to the Times) though somewhat less satisfying. In the local Citizen Register, Cheever had been described as “Ossining's most prominent treasure, our contact with greatness,” and the town supervisor had ordered all flags on public buildings to be flown at half-mast for ten days. But the service happened to coincide with the tumultuous reconstruction of Route 9 through downtown Ossining, which almost gave the impression that the world was collapsing outside the doors of Trinity Church. At a moment's notice, Bellow had agreed to deliver a tribute (pointing out, as he prepared to leave for the church, that Nathanael West had died on his way to Fitzgerald's funeral), which, had it been audible, would have elevated the occasion considerably. While the bulldozers groaned, Bellow spoke of the “dramatic metamorphosis” Cheever had undergone as an artist (“He was one of the self-transformers”), and described their friendship as “a sort of hydroponic plant, flourished in the air”: “It was, however, healthy, fed by good elements, and it was a true friendship. Because we met in transit … we lost no time in getting down to basics. On both sides there was instant candor.”

  The other speakers were a little on the vague side, having come to the awkward conclusion that they'd hardly known the man. Burton “Bud” Benjamin, a CBS News producer, had been a neighbor and an occasional backgammon partner; he was surprised when the family asked him to speak. (“I never really had a ‘hair-down’ talk with John,” he later admitted. “I wonder how John would have answered the question, ‘Who's your best friend?’ Or did he have one?”) Cheever had made himself known to the Benjamins largely through the haphazard use of their pool, and so the eulogist tailored his remarks accordingly: “He was marvelous, funny, unpredictable, full-of-life John … not a man to test the water's temperature with his toe.” Even Eugene Thaw—who'd certainly seen a lot of Cheever in recent years—emphasized that his friend had “lived in a world of imagination that we couldn't completely enter,” though he felt safe in adding that Cheever's later fame “never went to his head.” Among the mourners leaving the service, one of the most downcast was Dom Anfiteatro: “I was John's mechanic,” he announced in the receiving line.

  By his own confession, Max was rather drunk and distraught that day, and this time the family did seem to keep him at a distance. “It was just a savage experience,” he remembered. “I was all over the place.” The most memorable moment, for Max, was when he tried to introduce his would-be New Yorker editor, Chip McGrath, to Cheever's widow. “I kept saying to Chip, ‘You gotta meet her!’ And he's like, ‘No no, it's fine.’ So finally I introduced him, and she said, ‘Hello, it's nice to meet you,’ and walked away. Jesus.“ McGrath demurred when Max tried coaxing him back to Cedar Lane for the reception, which proved the last time certain old friends would gather in one place. Raphael Rudnik was there, struck by the oddly radiant look of bereavement on Sara Spencer's face (“very much as if she had lost her best friend, yet somehow in love with wonder and sociable about the loss itself, as if it were yet another amazing thing”). Zinny's daughters, Annie and Sarah, were there, chatting about the idyllic (in retrospect) Scarborough years; the Ettlingers brought a lot of food and spoke of even more distant times. At Mary's urging, Rob Cowley had come to the house to say goodbye to his and Susan's old retriever, Maisie, so feeble now she could hardly walk; the dog was lying in the master bedroom, where Cheever had died, and began thumping her tail when she saw Cowley. Suddenly remembering many things, he broke down sobbing.

  AS A WAY OF COPING with her father's illness and imminent death, Susan had begun a memoir of sorts the previous spring (“a book that would make people love my father and be sad that he was dead”), and by September she had five chapters written. Needing to flesh things out a bit, she decided it was time to have a look at her father's journal, which at Thaw's suggestion had been stored in the Morgan Museum vault on the Upper East Side. Sitting down amid a jumble of exquisite art, Susan was immediately taken aback by what she read; she rented a vault of her own and kept reading for a month or so. It only got worse (“I'd read parts aloud to Calvin and the color just drained out of his face”), and not only because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff; there were relatively few references to her own existence, and many of these were scornful. She'd pretty much decided to forget the memoir and write another novel instead, when Cheever's prospective biographer took her to lunch and revealed that he knew all about her father's bisexuality, and naturally would be putting that in his book. Meanwhile, too, she'd begun to receive badgering, drunken phone calls from Exley, who appeared to want money for some of Cheever's letters (“John wouldn't have wanted me to be this poor”), which, he implied, were damningly candid. Finally Susan decided to go ahead and write a memoir after all: if anybody was going to tell her father's secrets to the world (the part of it that didn't know them already), it was going to be her. Lovingly. “I don't ever want to go in a grocery store and see a tabloid headline: JOHN CHEEVER A FAG,” she said at the time.

  Home Before Dark, published in 1984, aroused a certain amount of controversy among those who'd known Cheever principally as a celebrant of sunlight. As the Boston Globe noted—not a little incredulously—Susan had characterized her father as “a sexual omnivore who was attracted to both groupies (female) and protégés (male), and an acerbic and sarcastic husband whose 41-year-old marriage was often filled with resentment.” Cheever's old friends in Westchester were, to put it gently, startled: Aline Benjamin (Burton's wife) had always assumed that Cheever's preoccupation with good and evil was a literary thing (“totally cerebral”), though she and others were bound to admit that the man had, for whatever reason, drunk a great deal for many years. Barrett Clark, an occasional Friday Clubber, remarked that Art Spear would have “dropped John like a hot rock” if he'd known about the bisexua
lity, and in fact Spear would not stand for any talk of Susan's book around the Friday Club or anywhere else. “Oh, that's just Susie!” he'd say when his daughters mentioned it. Phil Boyer, who'd always considered Cheever his “best friend,” was more saddened than resentful—forced to accept that all those years of giddy suburban squirearchy, the martinis and dogs and such, had been something of a sham. The consensus among objective readers, however, was overwhelmingly positive. As Justin Kaplan wrote in the Times Book Review, Susan had treated her father “with a quality Walt Whitman once described as ‘tenderness, blended with a curious remorseless firmness, as of some surgeon operating on a beloved patient.’ “

  Asked by the Boston Globe what he thought of his sister's book, Federico replied with his usual lucidity: “It's a realistic and sensitive portrait. As far as revelations go, it's all stuff that's going to come out anyway.” This would prove prescient, to say the least, as Susan wasn't alone in thinking there had been enough deception while her father was alive. Indeed, the more Ben considered the matter—the sheer breadth of it—the more puzzled and angry he became: “It made me think I must be bisexual, and the only reason I wasn't was because this guy had scared the wits out of me about how dangerous it was, and it turns out he's bisexual.” As with his sister (and Cheever himself, for that matter), Ben would make peace with his father by writing about him—the first completely successful writing he'd ever managed, what with the daunting standard of his father's work. “It turns out you can write a book without being him,” said Ben, who described the commentary he wrote in the Letters as “the beginning of identity”: “Because I'd write something he'd written, copy it, and then write something I wrote under it. And I could see how I could write something that wasn't as good, but was useful, and belonged there, and could exist on a page with something he'd written.” Eventually Ben quit his job at Reader's Digest to work full-time on the project, and has been a professional writer ever since.

  The Letters of John Cheever appeared four years after Home Before Dark, and gave new life to the notion that Cheever's children were bent on defaming his once-beloved memory. “My usual feeling about mail is that it should be received, answered and destroyed on the same day” Cheever had written Litvinov. “I do save yours although I am afraid that, when we are both dust, some damned fool will publish them.” Cheever's fears were realized to a degree he could scarcely have anticipated, for his son saw fit to publish even his most graphic letters to lovers of both sexes—since, after all, these reflected an essential part of the man, and besides the cat was out of the bag. “Plus,” said Ben, “I thought with some bitterness that if I had had to acknowledge this truth, then others, a lot farther from ground zero, could jolly well come aboard.” Among Ben's defenders was William Maxwell, who invoked Voltaire (“we owe nothing to the dead but the truth”) in his remarks to the BBC: “Would we like or prefer to know less about Flaubert (who was quite as shocking in his diaries, if not more, than Cheever) in order to find him less upsetting? It is too silly.” And really Cheever could hardly have found a more gracious apologist than Ben, who insisted on his father's essential goodness—”his joy and the talent he had for passing that joy on to the people around him”—which was evident, said Ben, even in his cruelty or hypocrisy. Though he could accuse Updike, say, of “exhibitionism” and a “stony heart,” his lavish praise on other (more public) occasions was, at bottom, “an attempt to be better than he was.” Finally, if Cheever's spirit hadn't been so painfully divided, he might well have pursued an easier occupation than writing novels—Bullet Park, for instance: “Nailles is too good to be anyone you ever met, and Hammer is too bad,” Ben wrote. “By and large his letters convey the sociable lovable side of John Cheever, but the careful reader will see another figure lurking in the background, the vain, ungenerous, ruthless and self-indulgent Paul Hammer. It's like the wolf seen at the edge of an Alpine forest a moment before nightfall. Without that wolf there would have been no sleeping children, no thatched cottage, no village at all.”

  The question of whether to publish the journal remained, and in this case it was hard to say what Cheever had wanted. “I seem unable to read this journal for what it is,” he'd written in 1956; “a means of refreshing my memory. I seem to look delightedly at myself in a glass. I think of it as something to be published and studied in libraries and this is not what I want at all.” As the years passed, though, and the pages mounted—more than four thousand in all, eventually—Cheever became increasingly convinced that the journal was not only a crucial part of his own oeuvre, but an essential contribution to the genre. At the very least he thought it belonged in a library somewhere. In the sixties he sent an excerpt to his manuscript collection at Brandeis,* and when he received his honorary degree at Harvard, he told Professor Daniel Aaron, in a burst of exuberance, that he wanted to “give [his] papers to Harvard.” In a cooler moment, Cheever clarified: by “papers” he meant specifically the journals, and by “give” he meant sell; Rodney Dennis, the curator of manuscripts at Houghton Library, offered five thousand dollars on the spot. “You're not serious,” said Cheever, and there the matter rested. After all, it wasn't merely an important literary document that Cheever proposed to part with, but a breathtakingly personal one. “I read last year's journal with the idea of giving it to a library,” he noted around this time. “I am shocked at the frequency with which I refer to my member.” Also, he couldn't fail to notice that he was awfully hard on his family—incessantly so in Mary's case (“she comes out very poorly and I am quite blameless which cannot be the truth”). † But toward the end, in any event, he seemed to make up his mind in favor of posthumous publication—indeed, as Ben remembered, he was “almost gleeful about the prospects.”

  Susan engineered the journal sale in the late eighties, laying out her father's twenty-eight notebooks on a long table in her apartment and letting various editors spend an hour or two alone with them. The bidding was lively, until Gottlieb offered the rather staggering sum of $1.2 million to publish excerpts serially in The New Yorker (where he'd succeeded Shawn as editor) and finally in a book from Knopf. The critic Ted Solotaroff, for one, was astonished by such largesse; as an editor at Harper & Row, he and a colleague had also examined the notebooks and been distinctly unimpressed. As he later wrote, “The image of Cheever that settled in my mind was of a writer who had just masturbated (he kept a record of that), doodling in the margins of his despair or boredom or occasional euphoria while waiting to hit the bottle.” Solotaroff was therefore “very surprised and not a little crestfallen” to find himself fascinated by the excerpts (perhaps 5 percent of the total journal) that appeared in six installments in The New Yorker from August 1990 to August 1991. Gottlieb, too, was satisfied with his selection, though he'd found the work “very, very painful”: “The material is so dark, and the suffering [Cheever] underwent is so at odds with the polite gentlemanly exterior that I had been exposed to.” It was worth it, though, to read mail from so many “mesmerized” readers—mostly. As Gottlieb recalled, “There were also those who thought, ‘Why are you doing this stuff? I don't want to read one more word about this dopey alcoholic fag.’ “

  Cheever often worried that, if he were perfectly candid in his work, he would thereby reveal “an almost unremittant depression and a frowsty concern with death,” though he liked to think that readers of his journal, at least, would approve of his brave determination to bare even the darkest parts of his soul (“What a good man he is!”). In that respect, he might have been disappointed by the actual response to The Journals of John Cheever, published as a book in October 1991. While the beauty of the prose was, as ever, given its due, reviewers tended to be less than admiring about any aspect of the author himself. “For all his vaunted honesty, Cheever had the drunk's habit of evading responsibility and not acknowledging the chaos and pain he caused,” Mary Gordon wrote in the Times Book Review; “a sad and depressing book,” said Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, “the record of a man so enchained
within the prison of self that he was never able to embrace others, even those he most loved.” As for Updike, he seemed almost chastened by this final knowledge of the man he used to consider “sprightly, debonair, gracious;” even though he'd once had to dress the drunken, naked Cheever for a night at Symphony Hall, and even though he'd read the man's beyond-the-grave abuse in the Letters, Updike was nonetheless shocked by the Journals. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” he wrote in The New Republic. “[Cheever's] confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition…”

  So much for the celebrant of sunlight.

  And yet. At least one protesting letter appeared in the Times Book Review—this from Thomas J. Sullivan, the Georgetown undergraduate whom Cheever had invited (with his friend George McLoone) to Cedar Lane, sight unseen, some twenty-five years before: “Cheever spent an hour answering our questions and sharing with us numerous anecdotes about his life,” Sullivan wrote. “He later took us to his neighbor's pool, where he demonstrated the Australian crawl stroke as he had envisioned it when he wrote the short story, ‘The Swimmer.’ The John Cheever I visited with was a witty, grinning, intellectually stimulating human being.”

  A YEAR AFTER THE PUBLICATION of the Journals, an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Cheever Letters” was aired. The plot is a little hard to explain in so many words. George Costanza is meeting his girlfriend Susan's family for the first time. Susan's crotchety father, meanwhile, has sent George a box of Cuban cigars (“made special for Castro”), which George has dumped on his friend Kramer, who in turn has smoked them in a cabin belonging to Susan's father and burned the place down. When George breaks the news to the father, the man is devastated and takes to his bed. The next day, Jerry and George visit the apartment where Susan's family is gathered, and a doorman appears bearing a charred strongbox: “The only thing left from the remains of the fire,” he says. Susan opens the box in front of Jerry, George, and the family (but not her father, who remains in bed): “Letters … from John Cheever!” she brightly announces, then reads one aloud: