Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  * When I reminded Max of this, his voice choked up with emotion. “I was moved by that gesture,” he said. “Because at the time I thought they felt, you know, ‘Now that he's dead, we no longer have to put up with [Max].’ I thought they wanted to write me off.”

  * I spent the last day of my last research trip to the Boston area at Brandeis, mostly examining the typescripts of Cheever's New Yorker stories. With about fifteen minutes to go before the library closed, I glanced at the journal pages Cheever had donated—though there was no need to do this, really, since I had my own copy of the journal. But right away I noticed something amiss: The Brandeis pages were too neatly typed, with a brand-new ribbon, no less. I found a passage on my laptop that I'd transcribed from the original—this about Cheever's meeting with Sophia Loren in the summer of 1967—and compared it with the Brandeis version: Sure enough, they were different! “She seems sincere, magnanimous, lucky and matteroffact,” Cheever had (sloppily) typed in the original, followed by a bit of dialogue between the two. “She seems sincere, magnanimous, lucky and intelligent,” reads the (immaculate) Brandeis version, and the subsequent dialogue has been deleted. Was it possible that Cheever had not only retyped but substantially rewritten many journal pages for the sake of a little academic posterity? I was about to check further when the nice librarian stuck her head in the room and whispered that it was time to go.

  † ”I'm unable to read the journals,” said Mary, “so I didn't have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can't read them. Snatches of them I've read, but I can't sit down and read that stuff. It isn't my life at all. It's him, it's all him. It's all inside him.”

  * Larry David seemed a little dismayed by my question, given what we'd discussed a few years earlier in regard to my Richard Yates biography. Back then he'd explained that the Seinfeld episode titled “The Jacket” was based on his disastrous, real-life encounter with Yates, whose daughter Monica he'd been dating at the time. When I mentioned that Cheever had a daughter named Susan, and pointed out that George's girlfriend in “The Cheever Letters” is also named Susan, David hastened to deny any real-life connection: “Just one of those things!”

  * Susan has been sober since 1992.

  * The rest of the top ten: E. B. White, John Gardner, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Michener, and J. D. Salinger. To be ranked so well ahead of Salinger must have pleased Cheever.

  * One is reminded of Cheever's vast readership in Russia and Eastern Europe, where the trappings of American suburbia—or postwar Manhattan, or anachronistic New England—are somewhat alien. He might have become the next big thing in China, too: the novelist Wang Meng, minister of culture in the late eighties, spoke of Cheever as his “favorite” Western writer and looked forward to sharing his enthusiasm with the people—but then he was driven from office, post-Tiananmen Square, as a proponent of “bourgeois liberalization.”

  Acknowledgments

  A FEW YEARS AGO, Ben Cheever wrote me a kind note about my biography of Richard Yates, which ultimately led to this book. Technically, I guess, this is an authorized biography, but the usual compromises of authorization don't apply. I was given material—all the material—and left alone with it, period. Ben sent letters, clippings, manuscripts, whatever he could find, and during one of my visits to Westchester he drove me and a copy of his father's massive journal to the UPS store. He and Susan also showed me around the Vanderlip estate in Scarborough, the better for me to visualize, say, how the Vanderlip Mansion might have inspired “Clear Haven” in The Wapshot Chronicle (think of the naked Moses scampering across the ghastly, sprawling roofs to Melissa's boudoir). Another day, Susan gave me the run of her apartment in Manhattan, refilling my coffee cup while I stood on chairs and rifled boxes in her closets. And I relished my chats with Federico so much that I felt a little bereft once I'd run out of questions to ask. As for Mary Cheever, she submitted to my grinding curiosity with a nice mixture of gaiety and frankness, and was always a gracious hostess during my visits to Cedar Lane—willing to keep me company if necessary, or leave me alone (rather with an old, wheezy black Labrador) in the library while I sorted through papers or photographs. I can hardly find words to thank her for these and so many other kindnesses, and the same goes for her children. The four of them made this project such a pleasure that I have to worry: surely it's downhill from here, at least with regard to writing biographies.

  I am beholden to Cheever's niece Jane Carr, who gave me a guided tour of the South Shore and let me rummage through her father's papers. Her brother, David, also sent a pile of Fred's letters from his last five years or so—a fascinating glimpse into the mind of that scrappy, jovial, maddening, lovable man, so like and yet unlike his brother. I also learned a great deal from my interviews with Fred's younger daughters, Sarah Connoway and Ann Adams, whose tender memories of their father are all the more touching in light of the occasional havoc he wreaked in their lives.

  Anyone who reads this book will readily grasp why Max Zimmer would prefer to be left alone, and I am very thankful for his cooperation. Once he'd overcome his initial reluctance, he provided me with every pertinent document, no matter how mortifying, in return for which he asked only that I tell the unvarnished truth. We have differed over certain of my conclusions, while respecting the integrity of each other's viewpoint. I'm also grateful to Scott Donaldson, Cheever's first biographer, who was courteous and helpful during the early stages of my research. His papers at William and Mary were indispensable to me—particularly his interview notes, which put me in touch with the various people who have died during the twenty-odd years between his book and mine. Many thanks, too, to Edward Hirsch and G. Thomas Tanselle and everyone else at the Guggenheim Foundation, whose generous fellowship made it possible to persevere after my family and I lost our house and almost everything in it to Hurricane Katrina.

  The following people sent letters, photographs, and/or other helpful material, in addition to spending (in many cases) long and perhaps tedious hours in conversation with me: Jennifer Boyer, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Dodie Merwin Captiva, Jane and Barrett Clark, Dennis Coates, Rob Cowley, Larry David, John Dirks, Pamela Spear Goff, Allan Gurganus, Hugh Hennedy, Michael Janeway, James Kaplan, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Tanya Litvinov, Ray Mutter, M.D., Nick Puner, Don and Ginger Reiman, Natalie Robins, Ned Rorem, David Rothbart, Raphael Rudnik, Philip Schultz, Rick Siggelkow, Roger Skillings, Clare and Eugene Thaw.

  A number of others also granted interviews or else provided written reminiscences: Renata Adler, Martin Amsel, Gino Anelli, Roger Angell, Martin Aronchick, Rollin Bailey, Helen Barolini, Richard Bausch, Marvin Bell, Peter Benelli, Anne Bernays, Simon Michael Bessie, LeClair Bissell, Tina Bourjaily, Vance Bourjaily, Douglas Brayfield, Connie Brothers, Emilie Buchwald, Joseph Caldwell, James Campbell, Susan Colgan, Elizabeth Logan Collins, Evan S. Connell, Molly Cook, Susan Crile, Susan Deakins, Ruth Denney, David Diamond, Dorothy Farrell, Thomas Foley, David Frieze, Linda Gillies, Dana Gioia, Herbert Gold, Ivan Gold, Robert Gottlieb, Christopher Gresov, Piri Halasz, Oakley Hall III, Daniel Halpern, Ron Hansen, Pauline Hanson, Shirley Hazzard, Aurie Henry, Rick Henry, Sandra Hochman, Joseph and Eugenia Hotchkiss, Jeanette Howland, Lee Hyla, Sarah Irwin, Joseph Kahn, Olivia Kahn, Justin Kaplan, Frederica Kaven, Carol Kitman, Arthur Laurents, John Leggett, William Luers, James McConkey, Janet Maslin, Lucy McCord, Charles McGrath, George McLoone, Melissa Meyer, Paul Moor, Lynn Nesbit, Jeffrey Newhouse, Mary Oliver, Anne Palamountain, Anne Peirce, Jean Phillips, Petru Popescu, Robert Ricter, Philip Roth, David Rothbart, Stephen Sandy, Robert Schneider, Grace Schulman, Laurens Schwartz, Joan Silber, J. William Silverberg, M.D., Kate Spear, Elizabeth Spencer, Sol Stein, Toby Stein, Richard Stern, Sarah Stevenson, William Styron, David Swope, Calvin Tomkins, John Updike, Aileen Ward, Mary Weatherall, Maureen and Roger Willson, Bill Winternitz, Tom Winternitz, Virginia Worthen, Ben Yagoda, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ethel Zaeder, and Andrew Ziegler.

  A veritable army of librarians, friends
, and kind strangers helped me with research, and I wish I could eulogize certain individuals at length. However, this book is long enough as it is. Suffice to say, I am very grateful to the selfless people listed below: Lillian Wentworth (Thayer Academy); Jennie Rathbun (Houghton Library, Harvard); Eric Esau (Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth); Candace Wait and Elaina Richardson (Yaddo); Stephen Crook (Berg Collection, New York Public Library); Melanie A. Yolles and Raynelda Calderon (Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library); Susan C. Pyzynksi (Brandeis); Susan Riggs (Swem Library, William and Mary); Jill Gage (Newberry Library); Kathy Kienholz (American Academy of Arts and Letters); Bernard R. Crystal and Jane Gorjevsky (Butler Library, Columbia); Roberta Arminio (Ossining Historical Society); Linda Beeler (Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy); Barbara Stamos (Quincy Historical Society); Kristen Weiss (Peabody Essex Museum); Marge Motes and Nancy L. Thurlow (Historical Society of Old Newbury); Taran Schindler (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale); David Kessler (Bancroft Library, UC-Berkeley); Nicolette Schneider and George Abbott (Syracuse University Library); Beth Alvarez (Hornbake Library, University of Maryland); Jessica Westphal, Daniel Meyer, and Sandra Roscoe (University of Chicago Library); Alice Lotvin Birney and Betty Auman (Library of Congress); Gina P. White (Dacus Library, Winthrop University); Tara Wenger and Tracy Fleischman (Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas); Kris McCusker and Deborah Hollis (University of Colorado Library); Christine Nelson and John Bidwell (Morgan Library); Marianne Hansen (Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr); Phyllis Andrews and Richard Peek (Rhees Library, University of Rochester); Marty Barringer (Georgetown University Library); Sean Noel and Ryan Hendrickson (Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University); Mary S. Presnell and Rebecca C. Cape (Lilly Library, Indiana University); Ron Vanderhye (Copley Library, University of San Diego); Rebecca Melvin (Morris Library, University of Delaware); Ian Graham (Bowdoin Library); Patrick J. Stevens (Kroch Library, Cornell); Amy C. Schindler (Grenander Department of Special Collections, University of Albany); Stephanie Heckaman (Culver Academy); Monique Ostiguy (National Library of Canada); Ellen Welch (University of Virginia); Bethany Holroyd (Union League Club); Sara Seten Berghausen (Duke Library); Carol Leadenham, Elena Danielson, and Robert M. Bulatoff (Hoover Institution, Stanford); Wendy Chmielewski (Swarthmore Library); Elizabeth Rogers and Jared Lewis (University of Utah Library); John B. Straw (Ball State University); Eliza Dame (Thayer Academy); Anita Israel (Longfellow National Historic Site); Judy Englander (Daphne Productions); Terry Karten (HarperCollins); Dwight Garner; Eleanor Munro; Carol Sklenicka.

  One of the golden milestones of my life was meeting David McCormick, my agent, at a time when I was still floundering around wondering what to do next. David reassured me with a kind of Jeevesian calm, and ultimately restored me to the middle class. Deb Garrison, my editor, combines an all but infallible sense of literary judgment with a loving heart—in other words, a paragon of her profession and humanity at large. And were it not for the kindness of our mutual friend, Sara Mosle, I wouldn't have met either David or Deb—in which case, well, the mind simply reels. Warm thanks, too, to Deb's excellent assistant, Caroline Zancan, and to my incredibly meticulous copy editor, Terry Zaroff-Evans. At this point I seem to hear the orchestra playing me off the stage, but let me not fail to mention a sweet, supportive family: Kay, Heidi, Chris, Eliza, Emma, Bob, Debra, Jim, Joyce, and of course my wonderful mother, Marlies, whose faith in me has always been disproportionate to the known facts. As for my wife, Mary, and our beautiful Amelia—bottomless love and gratitude to you both.

  Notes

  For a man who hated to dwell on the past, Cheever left an almost appallingly vast paper trail, and I'm afraid these notes reflect that. His letters are scattered among various libraries and individual recipients all over the world; archives of particular interest are at the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary. The largest manuscript archives are at Harvard's Houghton Library and Brandeis, where most of Cheever's New Yorker stories are preserved. For a detailed list of items in each of the major archives, I recommend a series of articles by Francis Bosha (two are cited below), which have appeared intermittently in Resources for American Literary Study.

  I will venture to guess that I am one of perhaps ten people—others include Cheever's children and his editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb—who have read all forty-three hundred or so pages (mostly typed, single-spaced) of Cheever's journal. Since 2000, this remarkable document and its attendant detritus (newspaper clippings, train tickets, business cards) have been available to the public at Houghton Library, whose excellent staff have done their best to make sense of it all. And yet it remains somewhat in disarray. A few volumes are haphazardly paginated, others are not, and anyway the pages are badly jumbled. A twenty-three-page segment of handwritten notes from Cheever's 1976 trip to Romania is included with Journal Four, which otherwise is concerned with the years 1955-56; the 242 pages of Journal Two have been shuffled like a deck of cards, skipping around willy-nilly between the years 1947 and 1953. And so on. During my research I compiled the most detailed chronology of Cheever's life that I could manage, and thus was able to restore the page order of the journal with a fair degree of accuracy. Then, once I'd transcribed what I needed, my family was displaced by Hurricane Katrina—whereupon my Xeroxed copy of the journal (or rather Ben Cheever's, alas), which had occupied four linear feet on the bottom shelf of my research cabinet, was drowned in the flood. I repeat that, fortunately, all the necessary parts were already on my computer, but the stately, organized document itself is lost to posterity. In any event, there would be no point in citing the unpublished journal: given the condition of the original, there is no way to cite accurately, and besides these notes are already intolerably swollen. The reader may assume that uncited Cheever quotations are from the unpublished journal at Houghton, or else from a curious memoir fragment that Cheever wrote in two-or three-page increments (double-spaced, perhaps fifty pages in all), sometimes titled “Bloody Papers.” This is available at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the better to distinguish it from the Houghton journal, I cite it throughout my first two chapters, where its use is most prevalent.

  I did try to avoid repetition in these notes, with indifferent results. Interview subjects are cited initially, and thereafter only when needed for the sake of clarity. I took care to date my interviews—for whatever reason—though I rarely cite separate interviews with a previously cited subject (I conducted some twenty interviews with Mary Cheever alone). The reader may assume that uncited quotations are from personal interviews, and in general, when a source (of any kind) is explicitly given in the text, or glaringly obvious, I omit further citation below. Uncollected stories, when quoted, are cited (once) according to their original magazine publication or their appearance in Cheever's disavowed first collection, The Way Some People Live* The canonical Stories of John Cheever is only cited when its contents are quoted for their biographical (as opposed to critical) interest, and the same applies to the novels. In dating letters, Cheever tended to give the month and day (sometimes only the latter: “Wednesday” or “The Twelfth”), but rarely the year: I supply the missing information in brackets when I'm fairly sure of it, and add a question mark when I'm not. Unless otherwise noted, letters from Cheever are in the hands of the recipients. Cheever's eccentric spelling and punctuation are often retained in quotation, though here and there I've cleaned things up for the sake of clarity. And finally—since I agree with Gerald Clarke that a lot of ellipses “[slow] down a narrative” (and are unsightly to boot)—I occasionally omit extraneous remarks from quotations, silently without ellipses; when, however, it seems at all important to indicate an omission, I soberly deploy the ellipsis.

  The following abbreviations appear in these notes:

  Academy American Academy of Arts and Letters

  Albany Grenande
r Department of Special Collections, University of Albany

  Bancroft The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  BC Benjamin Cheever (JC's older son)

  Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library

  BP Bullet Park. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

  Bryn Mawr Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College

  BU Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University

  Canada National Library of Canada

  CFP Cheever Family Papers

  Chicago University of Chicago Library

  CJC Donaldson, Scott, ed. Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

  Colorado Norlin Library, University of Colorado

  Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University

  Copley Helen K. and James S. Copley Library, University of San Diego

  Dartmouth Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College

  Delaware Morris Library, University of Delaware

  F Falconer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

  FC Federico Cheever (JC's younger son)

  FLC Jr. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, Jr. (JC's brother)

  FLC Sr. Frederick Lincoln Cheever, Sr. (JC's father)

  GT Weaver, John D., ed. Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.