Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Dear Henry [Susan's father],

  Last night with you was bliss. I fear my orgasm has left me a cripple. I don't know how I shall ever get back to work.

  I love you madly,

  John

  Amid general consternation, Susan's father shambles in from the bedroom. “The box! My letters! Give me that! Who told you to open this?” The man's grown son, bewildered and almost tearful, exclaims “Dad! You and John Cheever—?“ “Yes!” the man says defiantly. “Yes! He was the most wonderful person I've ever known! And I loved him deeply”—he turns to his wife (a Waspy, sarcastic ice queen)—”in a way you could never understand!” Larry David, the show's writer and co-creator, explained that he'd used Cheever as the lover of Susan's father simply because “he was a well-known writer who was gay”*

  One can only imagine how Cheever would have felt about being primarily known as a “writer who was gay,” but there it is. Because of this—to be exact, because he was a furtively bisexual writer who happened to marry and have children—a BBC documentary titled John Cheever and Family appeared in 1994, in which (as the London Times put it) “we are given a searing picture of the ripple effects of his life on the lives of his family.” Mary's performance is especially noteworthy. Pressed by the soft-voiced, remorseless off-camera interviewer to explain how she felt when she first suspected her husband “was not entirely heterosexual,” Mary evenly replied, “It didn't make an awful lot of difference to me.” Why not? Mary winced slightly, but smiled too, and chose her words with evident care: “By that time, our marriage was not a very full relationship …” The moment was characteristic. As Cheever's widow, Mary has answered many such questions, a bit grudgingly, and with a kind of bemused insinuation that there are better things to talk about. “What's important is what he wrote, not what he did,” she told the Boston Globe. “What was important in his life was to go on writing.” How important it was to her was resoundingly established in 1988, when she undertook what was described in the Washington Post as “the most expensive, protracted and vicious court battle to take place in recent years over a book.” The book was The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever, which had been proposed by a small publisher, Academy Chicago. For the token sum of fifteen hundred dollars, Mary had signed a contract for what she understood to be a selection of her husband's uncollected work, arranged in consultation with the family. This, however, was not what Academy Chicago (ultimately) had in mind; rather, they preferred a book that included everything omitted from The Stories of John Cheever: Hemingwayesque juvenilia (“Fall River,” “Late Gathering”), Depression-era potboilers (“His Young Wife,” “Saratoga”), topical fiction (“Frère Jacques,” “Behold a Cloud in the West”), army sketches scribbled at odd moments with a blunt pencil (“Sergeant Limeburner,” “The Invisible Ship”), and of course the entirety of The Way Some People Live, the very thought of which had never failed to make Cheever cringe in horror. After three years and almost a million dollars in legal fees, Mary “won” the case—that is, the contract was declared invalid—though Academy Chicago was still able to publish a collection of thirteen stories (including the first four mentioned above) whose copyrights had lapsed. “I must miss him, yes,” Mary sighs at the end of John Cheever and Family, while the old Cedar Lane farmhouse appears onscreen. “I must miss him. Because why am I living this way, if I don't miss him? What's the sense of this? No sense.”

  And what of the children? Most children are ambivalent about their fathers; Cheever's are more so, as anyone who reads Susan's various memoirs will gather. “[M]y father loved his children,” she wrote in the first and most affectionate one. “The three of us were, as he said, ‘the roof and settle’ of his existence. As individuals we often displeased him, but as a unit we were cherished and indispensable.” This is certainly true, though Susan is also eloquent about the damage done by self-absorbed alcoholic parents and John Cheever in particular, writing of her own inherited struggle with alcohol in Note Found in a Bottle* Her mother, however, categorically denies that Susan was ever a real alcoholic, regarding such a preposterous (to her) idea as simply “part of [Susan's] identification with her father.” And Ben would agree, at least, that his father has cast a long and complicated shadow over Susan's life: “I always feel like she's marrying Daddy,” he remarked in John Cheever and Family. “First she married the son of the man who published his first story. Then she married a man who was like Daddy appeared to be—went to Princeton, had some money, wrote full-time for The New Yorker. Then she married an alcoholic writer at the top of his powers, which is Warren Hinckle.” The irony is that Cheever himself would hardly have wanted—very often did not want—such an odd, talented, challenging daughter, which of course Susan knows better than anyone. As she observed, more or less cheerfully, “In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them”—Mary included—”I'm proud to say, and hope I've continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty.”

  As for Ben, writing about his father in the Letters might have been the “beginning of identity,” but it was hardly the end of it. His first two novels, The Plagiarist and The Partisan, were both about domineering literary father figures, and both reflect something of what it's like to feel as if one were “a minor character in someone else's book,” and never mind the more fraught sexual issues. That said, Ben has since written a number of books that have little to do with father figures one way or the other.

  Federico, for his part, feels somewhat fortunate in comparison: “I think my experience as a child was quite different from Ben and Susan's, which explains partially our very different trajectories in life. To some degree, when you're the child of a relatively famous person you have the choice of going into the family business or not. I decided not to. But I think he was judgmental with them in a way he wasn't with me, and as a result they spent a lot of their lives chasing his approval through proxies, while I haven't.” And yet Federico's childhood was far from ideal, given his frequent isolation with a ruinously alcoholic father; one can't help wondering whether the memories make him angry or sad sometimes. “I was cast in the role of a helpmate, and wasn't really entitled to have anger,” he explained.

  Sometimes it pisses me off massively … but what do you do with that? There's no help for that. You do what you do.

  I don't know what it would be like to come from a normal family. I have not a clue. It's interesting because I'm bringing up my own children and they have, like most children, space to indulge themselves—to be angry without reason, run around and do stupid things, to test their parents’ love. This was not something I ever had.

  And what, finally, of Max? A few days after Cheever died, he found himself alone in his little apartment. There were no more errands to run, no funerals to attend; his therapist had advised him to stop writing for a while; he couldn't go back to Utah, what with one thing and another, and for the moment he was unemployed. Cheever was gone, and Cheever had dominated his life for the past few years. He began banging his head against the wall. “He had died without ever letting me know if he actually respected me, actually thought I was a talented writer, actually cared about me, actually saw me as something more than a hand-job,” said Max. (“If I declare the depth of the love I feel for [Max] I am afraid that he may exploit this,” Cheever had noted a year before his death.) “I remember standing there howling because I hurt so much and felt so empty.” Then, one night in a bar, he told two of his ex-students what had happened—quite certain their friendship would end as a result. “But they said, ‘Jesus Christ, that's what you've been going through … ?’” Max recalled. “So that's how I started to come back. And finally I told [my girlfriend], just sobbing my eyes out. And I expected her to walk out the door, but she put her arms around me.”

  Max stayed in the East and picked up the pieces. Falling back on his engineering degree, he supported himself as a freelance technical writer and eventually started his own business. Remarried now, with a family of his own, he lives in a pleasant
lake community in New Jersey, and for the most part manages not to dwell on the past. “If there's someone who never loved himself, it was John,” Max said twenty-five years ago. Now he says this:

  He was extraordinarily blessed by anyone's standards—fame, wealth, a wonderful wife, great kids who did him proud and loved him, a long and highly successful career, talent, friends, on and on—but he liked to say that all he had in life was an old dog. There was his despair. And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others. He changed the course of my life. I took it from there. Today I look at my own two sons—close in age to my age then—and I can't imagine anyone wanting anything of them except to see that they keep moving forward.

  • • •

  AS STYRON GORGEOUSLY DECLAIMED at the medal ceremony, “John Cheever's position in literary history is as immovably fixed as one of those huge granite outcroppings which loom over the green lawns and sunlit terraces in the land of his own magic devising.” Doubtless Cheever seemed a safe bet in 1982. Three years before, around the time of his Pulitzer, he was ranked third—behind only his eulogists, Bellow and Updike—in a Philadelphia Inquirer survey of the living American writers whose work was expected to “endure and be read by future generations.”* If Cheever were eligible for such a survey today, some three decades later, it's unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top twenty. One can only hazard a few guesses as to why. It bears repeating that it's hard to determine Cheever's niche in our national literature, and academic canon-makers are fond of niches; in other words, the very fact that he was a “self-transformer,” as Bellow put it (speaking only of the quarter-century of Cheever's career contained in the Stories), would seem to have worked against him. The scholar Robert Morace covered the spectrum nicely: “Groping about for ways to understand, i.e., pigeonhole, Cheever, reviewers and critics have called him a satirist, a transcendentalist, an existentialist, a social critic, a religious writer, a trenchant moralist, an Enlightened Puritan, an Episcopalian anarch, a suburban surrealist, Ovid in Ossining, the American Chekhov, the American Trollope for an age of angst, a toothless Thurber.” Who are Cheever's influences? Arguably too many (and too well assimilated) to say. Whom did he influence? Ditto, and the manner of his influence (again, for the very reason of his versatility) is hard to trace. At any rate, academics tend to throw up their hands: Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated, and dissertations featuring his work have trickled almost to nothing. Odder still: though The Wapshot Chronicle appears on the Modern Library's vaunted list of the 100 Best [English-language] Novels [of the Twentieth Century], and Falconer appears on the even more recent Time list, neither novel (nor any of Cheever's others) is read much anymore. The current Vintage edition of Falconer sells about three thousand copies a year, and Harper's handsome 2003 reprints of the Wapshot novels—which include adulatory, almost hectoring forewords by Rick Moody and Dave Eggers—have sold fewer than ten thousand copies combined. The Stories of John Cheever (“They seem in the end to be mostly what I've written”) sells about five thousand copies a year—excellent for a book of stories, negligible for a classic of the postwar era.

  Even his status as Ossining's “most prominent treasure” (a humble man who used to bring coffee to his barber!) seemed to wane after his death—indeed, Cheever lived just long enough to see the writing on the wall. “Superintendent Wishnie moved at a town meeting that a short street be named John Cheever Street,” he wrote the Dirkses in March 1982. “This was stopped by the baglady Jodine Wang. I want to name a street Jodine Wang Street.” Twenty-four years would pass before Cheever's name was finally bestowed on the main reading room at the Ossining Public Library, the only memorial in his adopted hometown. That, however, is one more memorial than he's gotten in Quincy or its environs. The house where Cheever was born, at 43 Elm Avenue, is now occupied by one Ronald Goba, who—despite being the retired director of English for Hingham public schools—knew nothing of Cheever's former occupancy until a few years ago, when a lone researcher appeared on his doorstep. “I'll tell you this,” said Goba. “There are no Cheever ghosts in here.” Nor at Thayer, where only a few of the faculty bother to recall (rather sourly) that Cheever was expelled for smoking and wrote a smart-alecky article about it for some magazine. And finally in Norwell—next to his father for all time (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”)—Cheever's lichen-stained headstone sags a little into the earth. “He's kind of our lost child,” said Edward Fitzgerald of the Quincy Historical Society.

  “I'm not inclined to think of myself as being remembered for anything,” Cheever said with characteristic (if calculated) modesty in 1979. “It seems to me that a writer is obviously mortal, and looking at the history of literature, a great deal that is splendid is splendid only for a very brief period of time.” For all the delight he took in his own fame, Cheever's shade just might be pleased with the less-than-general readership he's ended up with (for now): this includes other writers, certainly, as well as discerning people the world over. And no wonder. As Updike wrote in his New Yorker obituary, “He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been.”* Impervious to trends, Cheever remained true to a highly peculiar vision, and his archetypal world endures—waiting to be rediscovered by those who remember him, if at all, as a suburban writer or a New Yorker writer or, for that matter, “a writer who was gay.” In the meantime he will never lack champions among the initiated. In 2004 Jonathan Yardley called The Stories of John Cheever an “essential monument of American literature,” and Eggers went so far as to insist “that Cheever writes beautifully and with as much lust for words and life as anyone this country has yet produced”—this while imploring a new generation to delight in his novels as well: “They are so filled with love that it's hard to believe that a man wrote these sentences, and not some kind of freakish winged book-writing angel-beast.”

  “Angel-beast” is a useful epithet for the man, whose older son can't help feeling annoyed by strangers who seem “closer to John Cheever than [he] ever did,” simply because they happened to read some books. Take the case of Patrick Coyne, a New York cabbie who used to give free rides to people who shared his love of Cheever; when this got back to Liz Smith, the columnist, she asked Coyne to supply her with a “short, pithy, and pointed quote” from his favorite author. Thus Coyne was emboldened to write a note to Cheever, who naturally replied: “I can't imagine what has kept us apart all these years. I gather you are Irish. The Cheevers claim not to be. ‘Don't ever wear an overcoat,’ my father often said, ‘you might be taken for an Irishman.’ Only a true Irishman would make such a remark. … However, I never wear an overcoat. … I would hit any man—or woman—in the nose who called me ‘short, pithy, and pointed.’ “ Well! Coyne was all the more charmed, and on Cheever's death he wrote a letter to the widow about how “characters, out of Cheever, step into [his] cab”—the famous Disco Sally, for instance, “a wizened monkey-skinned woman in her eighties who, in the company of young effetes, made the round of late night discos. Disco Sally died this year. John would have understood the fear that drove her relentlessly from disco to disco.” John would have understood, all right … but still Ben feels a slight impulse to argue with people like Coyne: “I want to ask them where they were when he was drinking, when he needed his eyeglasses found or to be driven to the hospital. This is foolishness. He was at his best on the page.”

  He was at his best, and worst, on the page—he was himself, in short, and hence that massive journal: a monument of tragicomic solipsism, or (to paraphrase one of Cheever's favorite pensées) a history of one man's struggle to be illustrious. “No one, absolutely no one, shared his life with him,” said Federico. “There was no one from whom he could get honest advice. Of course, this state of affairs was very much his own doing, but i
t must have been hard sometimes.”

  And yet! What of the man who was moved to thank God for the “party” of being alive? The delightful writer who longed, above all, to impart “glad tidings”? He might have chosen to end this story with some happy time in his life—Thanksgiving 1955, say, when his imagination was afire with a joyous first novel, and he'd recently been confirmed in the church, and he'd begun to suspect that he might escape the fate of his “accursed” family after all. That night, Cheever dreamed of sifting among fragments for a clue, perhaps, to the future:

  And at 3 am I seem to be walking through Grand Central and the latch on my suitcase gives, spilling out onto the floor the contents of my life and what do we find here? A pint of gin and some contraceptives; the score for Handels Watermusic and a football; the plays of Shakespere, The Brothers Karamazov and Madame Bovary; a sweater, a jockstrap and an old maddar necktie; but also to signify times of irresolution and loss about which I know plenty a daisey for counting and a candle for impotence; but also a hairbrush and a love poem and a photograph of happy times on the deck of the tern and a confirmation certificate and a psychiatrists bill and a yellow leaf or somesuch—the stone from a beach to signify times of solid high spirits.

  * It might as well be noted here that Cheever's reputation in the UK never really caught on. Gottlieb mentioned how he'd often try to press Cheever's work on English writers, who tended to say things like “What a discovery! Why isn't he better known?” Part of the answer may be found in the (brief) London Times obituary which sniffishly dismissed Cheever as “a typical graduate of the ‘New Yorker’ school of writers”—a school the Times evidently held in low regard, though the obituarist did see fit to concede that Cheever had written a few “inimitably funny short stories,” and proposed that “the best of these are to be found in his earlier collections, notably The Way Some People Live.“ That final observation, all alone, would have soured Cheever's mood for a month.