Cheever Read online

  ALSO BY BLAKE BAILEY

  A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

  EDITED BY BLAKE BAILEY

  John Cheever: Complete Novels

  John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings

  For Mary, Marlies, and Amelia

  I've never intended to be patronizing. As a child I was told to remember, at all times, that I was a CHEEVAH. I thought this bullshit had cured me.

  —John Cheever to Frederick Exley

  Fred, remember you are a Cheever.

  —John Cheever's advice to his younger son

  I am nothing and everything is a nothing and I want to play out the role to the end; and if I am less than nothing I am a wayward boy, angry at Mummy and Daddy and a little queer to boot; and how does this square with the image of a cheerful man of forty-five who has been given everything in the world he desires but a degree of unselfconsciousness.

  —John Cheever, Journals

  … it is too much to ask that people who spend very much time in a world of their own, as all writers do, should immediately and invariably grasp what is going on in this one.

  —William Maxwell

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE {1637–1912}

  CHAPTER TWO {1912–1926}

  CHAPTER THREE {1926–1930}

  CHAPTER FOUR {1930–1934}

  CHAPTER FIVE {1934–1935}

  CHAPTER SIX {1935–1938}

  CHAPTER SEVEN {1938–1939}

  CHAPTER EIGHT {1939–1941}

  CHAPTER NINE {1941–1943}

  CHAPTER TEN {1943–1945}

  CHAPTER ELEVEN {1945–1946}

  CHAPTER TWELVE {1946–1949}

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN {1949–1951}

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN {1951–1952}

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN {1952–1954}

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN {1954–1956}

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN {1956–1957}

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN {1957}

  CHAPTER NINETEEN {1957–1959}

  CHAPTER TWENTY {1959–1960}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE {1960–1961}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO {1961}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE {1962–1963}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR {1964}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE {1964}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX {1964–1965}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN {1966}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT {1966–1967}

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE {1967–1968}

  CHAPTER THIRTY {1968–1969}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE {1969–1970}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO {1969–1970}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE {1971–1972}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR {1972–1973}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE {1973}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX {1974}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN {1974}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT {1975}

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE {1975}

  CHAPTER FORTY {1975–1976}

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE {1976–1977}

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO {1977}

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE {1977}

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR {1977-1978}

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE {1978–1979}

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX {1979}

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN {1979–1980}

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT {1980–1981}

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE {1981–1982}

  CHAPTER FIFTY {1982}

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  ON APRIL 27, 1982, less than two months before his death from cancer, John Cheever appeared at Carnegie Hall to accept the National Medal for Literature. While his colleagues stood and cheered (“John had nothing but friends,” said Malcolm Cowley), Cheever hobbled across the stage with the help of his wife, Mary. Months of cancer treatment had left him bald and pitifully frail, shrunken, but his voice was firm as he spoke. In his journal he'd referred to this occasion as his “Exodus” and reminded himself that literature was “the salvation of the damned”—the lesson of his own life, surely, and the gist of what he said that day at Carnegie Hall. “A page of good prose,” he declared, “remains invincible.” As John Updike remembered, “All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.”

  Seven years before—his marriage on the rocks, most of his books out of print—Cheever had tried drinking himself to death. He was teaching at Boston University, beset by ghosts from his awful childhood in nearby Quincy: “There were whole areas of the city I couldn't go into,” he said later. “I couldn't, for example, go to Symphony Hall because my mother was there.” Updike was living on the opposite end of Back Bay at the time, and when he'd visit the small furnished apartment Cheever had taken near the university (“no more lived-in than a bird perch”) he'd notice the first dusty page of Falconer stuck in the typewriter. One night he came to take Cheever to Symphony Hall, and was disconcerted when the older man emerged naked on his fourth-floor landing while the door swung shut behind him. Fortunately, there was no automatic locking mechanism, and Updike assumed the role of a dutiful if slightly exasperated son: “[Cheever's] costume indicated some resistance to attending symphony but I couldn't imagine what else, and I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes.” That winter Cheever went for long, staggering walks along Commonwealth Avenue, rarely wearing an overcoat despite freezing weather (his father had warned him that overcoats make one look Irish). Finally he sat next to a bum and the two huddled together, sharing a bottle of fortified wine. When a policeman threatened to arrest him, Cheever gave the man a look of bleary, aristocratic reproach: “My name is John Cheever,” he drawled (Cheevah). “You're out of your mind.”

  He came to himself in the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center on East Ninety-third Street in Manhattan, where for twenty-eight days he shared a bedroom and bath with four other men. He couldn't remember leaving Boston. As for Smithers, it was grim: he was told that a man had recently jumped out the window in the ward where he slept; he was taunted in group therapy for pulling a fancy accent. “Displaying much grandiosity and pride,” one of his counselors noted. “Denying and minimizing grossly.” The staff was particularly struck by Cheever's tendency to laugh at “inappropriate” moments: little giggles would erupt while he recalled, say, a time he'd hurt his family. On the telephone with his daughter, however, Cheever would become tearful and say he couldn't bear it another day. And yet he sensed that an early departure would amount to suicide—and he wanted to live, oddly enough; he wanted to finish Falconer. “Cheever's is the triumph of a man in his sixties,” Bernard Malamud said of his colleague's miraculous resurrection. “Here he'd been having a dreadful time … but he stayed with it. And through will and the grace literature affords, he saved himself.” After his wife drove him home from Smithers on May 7, 1975, Cheever never took another drink.

  Less than two years later, he appeared on the cover of Newsweek over the caption “A Great American Novel: John Cheever's ‘Falconer.’” (He'd also been the subject of a 1964 Time cover story, “Ovid in Ossining.”) After reading Falconer, the article proclaimed, “one has the ecstatic confidence of finishing a masterpiece.” Large claims were made for Cheever's place in world literature: “Long before Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon began tinkering with narrative conventions, Cheever had unobtrusively disrupted the expected shapes of fiction. As was the case with Faulkner in France, Cheever has been unexpectedly recognized and honored in Russia for the corrosive criticism of American civilization his understated fiction implies.” The fact that all but one of Cheever's story collections were out of print was described as “a scandal of American publishing.”

  This was remedied the following year, 1978, when The Stories of John Cheever became one of the most successful collections ever publishe
d by an American writer. The book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for six months and won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Book Award. Cheever (appalled) was introduced as “the Grand Old Man of American Letters” on a Boston talk show. The bookish middle class, it seemed, identified en masse with Cheever's vision of suburban alienation; his “corrosive criticism” of their culture was mitigated, perhaps, by what the author himself wryly called his “childlike sense of wonder.”

  Cheever was determined to put his resurgent celebrity to its best use. As Cowley observed, “Yankees are distinguished, and tormented as well, by having scruples.” Cheever—a consummately scrupulous, tormented Yankee—paid off old debts to the people and institutions that had been kind to him in harder times. He served on the board at Yaddo and, as chairman of the American Academy's grants committee, read at least a hundred new novels a year. He rarely declined offers to give readings, no matter how humble or remote the venue, though he'd despised such obligations in the past. “He was like a man who puts his affairs in order before setting out on a journey,” said Cowley.

  He even seemed to come to terms, at long last, with what he called “the most subterranean eminence in [his] person”—a fear that he was a sexual (as well as social) impostor. “Here is some sort of conflict,” he wrote in 1963, though it might have been any year; “a man who has homosexual instincts and genuinely detests homosexuals. They seem to him unserious, humorless and revolting.” Thus, even at the best of times, a shadow was cast over his happiness, though he often tried counting his blessings with a sort of wan bemusement: a loving family, a beautiful house, friendly dogs, talent, fame, on and on. Still the shadow remained, whatever the surface facts of his life (“I wake from a dream”—he wrote in his journal—”in which I am committing a gross and compulsive indecency”).

  Falconer had been a catharsis of sorts—the story of a man who makes peace with himself, partly in the form of a homosexual love affair—and shortly after he finished the novel, Cheever also seemed to find peace. While visiting the University of Utah Writing Program in 1977, he met a young man who had none of the attributes of a “sexual irregular,” as Cheever would have it: “His air of seriousness and responsibility, the bridged glasses he wore for his nearsightedness, and his composed manner excited my deepest love …” The young man's name was Max, and, in some form or another, he remained in Cheever's life until the end. Cheever often wondered if he were being succored by the ghost of his beloved older brother, Fred, or some other long-lost friend; at any rate he seemed more inclined to accept his own nature, such as it was. “Life is an improvisation!” he liked to say, especially in later years.

  Certainly life had turned out better than he ever could have hoped as a lonely, starving artist in the Depression, in flight from a family life that was “bankrupt in every way”: “I remember waking in some squalid furnished room,” he wrote, two years before his death, “probably with a terrible hangover and very likely with a stiff and unrequited prick.” At such times he used to comfort himself with dreams of future love and success—and now, fifty years later, it had all come true. “And so I woke … with a wife and the voices of birds, dogs and children but what I had not anticipated was the sound of a brook. And so it seems to be more bounteous than once I could have imagined.” But then a curious afterthought: “It could, of course, be more horrifying.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  {1637-1912}

  MANY SKELETONS IN FAMILY CLOSET,” Leander Wapshot wrote in his diary. “Dark secrets, mostly carnal.” Even at the height of his success, Cheever never quite lost the fear that he'd “end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by [his] children, an old man approaching death without a companion.” This, he sensed, was the fate of his “accursed” family—or at least of its men, who for three generations (at least) had seemed “bound to a drunken and tragic destiny.” There was his paternal grandfather, Aaron, rumored to have committed suicide in a bleak furnished room on Charles Street in Boston, a disgrace too awful to mention. One night, as a young man, Cheever had sat by a fire drinking whiskey with his father, Frederick, while a nor'easter raged outside. “We were swapping dirty stories,” he recalled; “the feeling was intimate, and I felt that this was the time when I could bring up the subject. ‘Father, would you tell me something about your father?’ ‘No!’ And that was that.” By then Cheever's father was also poor and forsaken, living alone in an old family farmhouse on the South Shore, his only friend “a half-wit who lived up the road.” As for Cheever's brother, he too would become drunken and poor, spending his last days in a subsidized retirement village in Scituate. No wonder Cheever sometimes felt an affinity to characters in Ibsen's Ghosts.

  Despite such ignominy, Cheever took pride in his fine old family name, and when he wasn't making light of the matter, he took pains to impress this on his children. “Remember you are a Cheever,” he'd tell his younger son, whenever the boy showed signs of an unseemly fragility. Some allusion was implicit, perhaps, to the first Cheever in America, Ezekiel, headmaster of the Boston Latin School from 1671 to 1708 and author of Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, the standard text in American schools for a century or more. New England's greatest schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever was even more renowned for his piety—”his untiring abjuration of the Devil,” as Cotton Mather put it in his eulogy. One aspect of Ezekiel's piety was a stern distaste for periwigs, which he was known to yank from foppish heads and fling out windows. “The welfare of the commonwealth was always upon the conscience of Ezekiel Cheever,” said Judge Sewall, “and he abominated periwigs.” John Cheever was fond of pointing out that the abomination of periwigs “is in the nature of literature,” and it seems he was taught to emulate such virtue on his father's knee. “Old Zeke C,” Frederick wrote his son in 1943, “didn't fuss about painted walls—open plumbing, or electric lights, had no ping pong etc. Turned out sturdy men and women, who knew their three R's, and the fear of God.” John paid tribute to his eminent forebear by giving the name Ezekiel to one of his black Labradors (to this day a bronze of the dog's head sits beside the Cheever fireplace), as well as to the protagonist of Falconer. However, when an old friend mentioned seeing a plaque that commemorated Ezekiel's house in Charlestown, Cheever replied, “Why tell me? I'm in no way even collaterally related to Ezekiel Cheever.”

  Cheever named his first son after his great-grandfather Benjamin Hale Cheever, a “celebrated ship's master” who sailed out of Newbury-port to Canton and Calcutta for the lucrative China trade. Visitors to Cheever's home in Ossining (particularly journalists) were often shown such maritime souvenirs as a set of Canton china and a framed Chinese fan—this while Cheever remarked in passing that his great-grandfather's boots were on display in the Peabody Essex Museum, filled with authentic tea from the Boston Tea Party. In fact, it is Lot Cheever of Danvers (no known relation) whose tea-filled boots ended up at the museum; as for Benjamin, he was all of three years old when that particular bit of tea was plundered aboard the Dartmouth on December 16, 1773. Also, there's some question whether Benjamin Hale (Sr.) was actually a ship's captain: though he appears in the New-bury Vital Records as “Master” Cheever, there's no mention of him in any of the maritime records; a “Mr. Benjamin Cheever” is mentioned, however, as the teacher of one Henry Pettingell (born 1793) at the Newbury North School, and “Master” might as well have meant schoolmaster. Unless there were two Benjamin Cheevers in the greater Newbury area at the time (both roughly the same age), this would appear to be John's great-grandfather.

  The ill-fated Aaron was the youngest of Benjamin's twelve children, and it was actually he who had (“presumably”) brought back that ivory-laced fan from the Orient: “It has lain, broken, in the sewing box for as long as I can remember,” Cheever wrote in 1966, when he finally had the thing repaired and mounted under glass.

  My reaction to the framed fan is violently contradictory. Ah yes, I say, my grandfather got it in China, this authenticatin
g my glamorous New England background. My impulse, at the same time, is to smash and destroy the memento. The power a scrap of paper and a little ivory have over my heart. It is the familiar clash between my passionate wish to be honest and my passionate wish to possess a traditional past. I can, it seems, have both but not without a galling sense of conflict.

  To be sure, it's possible that Aaron had sailed to China and retrieved that fan—as his son Frederick pointed out, most young men of the era went out on at least one voyage “to make them grow”—but his future did not lie with the China trade, which was effectively killed by Jefferson's Embargo Act and the War of 1812. By the time Aaron reached manhood, in the mid-nineteenth century, the New England economy was dominated by textile industries, and Aaron had moved his family to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he worked as a shoemaker. But he was not meant to prosper even in so humble a station, and may well have been among the twenty thousand shoe workers who lost their jobs in the Great Strike of 1860. In any event, the family returned to Newburyport a few years later and eventually sailed to Boston aboard the Harold Currier: “This, according to my father,” said Cheever, “was the last sailing ship to be made in the Newburyport yards and was towed to Boston to be outfitted. I don't suppose that they had the money to get to Boston by any other means.”

  Frederick Lincoln Cheever was born on January 16, 1865, the younger (by eleven years) of Aaron and Sarah's two sons. One of Frederick's last memories of his father was “playing dominoes with old gent” during the Great Boston Fire of 1872; the two watched a mob of looters, the merchants fleeing their stores. The financial panic of 1873 followed, in the midst of which Aaron—driven by poverty and whatever other devils—apparently decided his family was better off without him. (“Mother, saintly old woman,” writes Leander Wapshot. “God bless her! Never one to admit unhappiness or pain … Asked me to sit down. ‘Your father has abandoned us,’ she said. ‘He left me a note. I burned it in the fire.’ “) After Aaron's departure, his wife seems to have run a boardinghouse to support her children, or so his grandson suspected (“If this were so I think I wouldn't have been told”), though Aaron's fate was unknown except by innuendo. As it happens, the death certificate indicates that Aaron Waters Cheever died in 1882 of “alcohol & opium—del[irium] tremens;” his last address was 111 Chambers (rather than Charles) Street, part of a shabby immigrant quarter that was razed long ago by urban renewal.