John Cheever (18 page)

Often he and Joe hustled home from their climbing to be in time for the grand social hour at Stone House, which commenced precisely at 6:00
P.M.
and ended at 7:00
P.M.
with the ringing of the dinner bell. Some hard drinking was done during that daily one-hour cocktail party. On Sundays the Treetops schedule changed. For the Sabbath only, drinking was permitted at lunch, and ordinarily there was homemade ice cream with the meal. Once, Hotchkiss recalls, he and Cheever nearly cranked their arms off trying to make the rum ice cream harden. Polly, it turned out, had poured in too much of the principal ingredient.

Cheever was “nearly always friendly” in those days, Hotchkiss observes, except when he caught a whiff of unkindness in someone else's behavior. He felt strongly about good manners and about the respect for the feelings of others that lay behind them. And “he was good with so many different sorts of people,” too. Polly adored him, Winter was very proud of him, and for six to eight years after the war he felt himself more their son than their son-in-law. He also got along well with the hired help, as did Susie. She sequestered herself in the back of the house with the Swedish cook and her children, acquiring their speech patterns in the process. “Ain't the Winternitzes got a nice summer place?” she asked her father. Meanwhile, he made friends with a doctrinaire Communist from Czechoslovakia who farmed the land and took care of the buildings the year round. Cheever helped him plow the fields, and undertook to be of assistance by ridding the place of the raccoons that were eating dozens of ears of corn each night.

As they worked together, the hired man tried to indoctrinate Cheever in the mysteries of his secular dogma. He would not whip the balky mare which sometimes refused to pull the plow, but he also declined to give her a name. Naming farm animals, he proclaimed, was “bourgeois sentimentality.” One evening he slipped a newspaper headline under Cheever's door:
LUXURY LIVING WEAKENS U.S.
, it read. Cheever put these incidents into “The Summer Farmer,” a 1948 story that pictures the Communist as unfairly wronged by a young gentleman farmer. Spreading out imaginatively from this experience, he wrote two other stories—“Vega” and “How Dr. Wareham Kept His Servants”—sympathetic to the plight of East Europeans who brought almost nothing to this country except their political passion. These were not really political stories at all, however. The hills of Vermont and New Hampshire were, he observed, full of old Communists from Latvia and Estonia and Russia and Poland and Germany—all of them aliens in a strange land. It was their alienation that commanded his sympathy.

Back in the city, the Cheevers surmounted the minor crisis of dispatching Susie to nursery school. Each morning they maintained a cheerfully upbeat demeanor before sending her off to the Walt Whitman School. Each afternoon they grilled her, unsuccessfully, on the activities of the day. Social life had its hazards as well. They went to a party at the Fields' where John performed an “atomic waltz” with Betty Fast, wife of writer Howard Fast. He carried her on his shoulders; she put out her cigarette in his ear; he dumped her on the floor.

Life was not all fun and games, however. Now that the war was over, the thirty-four-year-old Cheever was a full-time writer again, determined to make a living on the strength of his talent. For purposes of discipline, he established a daily routine. Each morning he dressed in his good suit and hat and rode down in the elevator with the other professional men who lived in the building. They got off on the first floor, however, while he continued to the basement. There he settled to work at a makeshift desk in the windowless storage room. He stripped to his shorts, hung up his coat and pants, and hammered away at his typewriter in the two-fingered style he had taught himself. He put the suit back on at lunchtime and at the end of the day for the elevator ride back upstairs.

His major project was a novel, and now he had a contract to spur him on. Hoping to build on their investment in
The Way Some People Live
, Random House gave him $2,400 of a $4,800 advance toward a novel early in 1946. At first Cheever was optimistic about its progress. It's “coming along nicely,” he wrote editor Robert Linscott in September 1946; the first draft should be done by November. He did not tell Linscott that from the start he harbored private doubts about the value of his novel-in-progress. He felt real pressure to produce the book. “I'm the only man in the east 50s who hasn't finished his novel,” he wrote John Weaver. At the end of 1947, responding to Linscott's request, he produced an outline for the Random House sales force.

The writing itself he was generally pleased with, Cheever observed in his preliminary remarks. He thought of his novel-in-progress as having the polish and charm “of a greeting card with an obscene message.” The New England of his youth came flooding back to him in memory, and it was this that gave his novel-to-be its “greeting card” quality. In subject matter, the book returned to the milieu of
The Holly Tree
. The story was about the Field family, who in 1936 lived on a farm on the North River south of Boston after losing their house to foreclosure. The Fields' poverty, though unmentioned, affects everything in their lives. The principal characters are father Aaron, who had once been successful but lost his money; mother Sarah, “a run-of-the-mill New England matriarch” who has given up her beauty without a struggle and dreams of being invited to the White House; and their sons, Eben, “personable and cruel,” and Tom, an “outing-club type” who leaves Dartmouth in his sophomore year to go to work in a textile house.

The “parochial charm” of the family conceals an impulse to violence. Thus Cheever intended to contrast sentimental scenes of such pleasant rituals as berry picking with others depicting the “lewdness and cruelty” that was also part of the picture. Aaron steals and sells his wife's jewelry. Eben leaves home. The gulf between Aaron and younger son Tom grows wider when the father attempts to seduce one of the son's girlfriends. Next Aaron tries to kill himself. Finally he leaves the farm to escape an illegitimate daughter, and the book follows Tom, Eben, Sarah, and others as they search for Aaron in Boston, New York, and Washington. There were some “wonderful girls” in this part, Cheever wrote, “and some wonderful ceremonies.”

Meanwhile, Sarah Field opens a gift shop to support herself and what's left of the family. Then, “for reasons that involve them all and that should be rooted in the first words of the book,” she commits a terrible murder. Now it is wartime. Tom goes off to serve in the Pacific. Sarah escapes prosecution. Aaron returns home and is drowned while swimming off Cohasset in 1944. The book ends with Tom on his way back for the funeral.

This outline of a novel—the Field Version, to give it a name—pointed forward to
The Wapshot Chronicle
and like that book derived much of its physical and emotional authenticity from Cheever's own background. His grandfather Aaron, like Aaron Field, deserted his family. His own parents lost their comfortable home in Quincy to foreclosure. His mother ran a gift shop. Cheever sometimes thought of older brother Fred, who left Dartmouth to work for a textile firm in Boston, as “personable and cruel.” Obviously both the Field Version and
The Wapshot Chronicle
are family sagas, with a concentration on the inner dynamics of a family in economic difficulties and a celebration of ceremony reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel.

Whatever its merits and whatever it promised of work completed—Cheever nowhere mentions how much actual writing he's done—this outline was greeted enthusiastically by Linscott. “That's a wonderful presentation,” he wrote Cheever on December 22, 1947. “You have certainly whetted my appetite for the book, and I shan't be happy until I read it.” A long unhappy period awaited both Linscott and Cheever, who was forced to announce delay after delay. He thought he had finished the book late in 1948, but his publishers thought not. More work was needed, and Cheever did what he could. The number of good, durable chapters was steadily growing, he reported in January 1950. Writing novels, he pointed out nine months later, was still his “principal aim in life.” But progress was fitful at best, for in the short term he had to write stories to support himself and his family and simply couldn't spare the time or energy to complete his novel. It was a frustrating business, and Cheever became increasingly sensitive about Linscott's inquiries.

Most of the new stories dealt with the Upper East Side he was inhabiting. In them he went beyond the spare unemotional prose of his early
New Yorker
work, and beyond “the funny, funny stories” of the “Town House” series. He was developing his capacity to suggest a whole life in miniature, to connote through significant detail the entire biography of his characters. To this bit of naturalistic legerdemain he now applied his gift for fantasy. In “The Enormous Radio” and “Torch Song,” both stories published in 1947, he artfully managed to combine the mundane and the mystical. So persuasive is the anthropological voice at the beginning of “The Enormous Radio,” with its revelation that Jim and Irene Westcott “went to the theatre an average of 10.3 times a year” and otherwise fit into “that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability” reported in college alumni bulletins, that it seems almost natural when the narrator reveals that the Westcotts' new radio transmits the unhappy quarrels of other residents in their apartment building. This circumstance, defying electronic explanation, confronts the Westcotts with precisely those things about their marriage that will not be mentioned in college alumni bulletins—and serves to remind us all of our sometime hypocrisy.

“Torch Song” delves still deeper into psychological aberration. Joan Harris, it is suggested, feeds on the decline and death of the several men she loves and cares for in their final months. But again the world she lives in is so convincingly recognizable and concrete that her vampirism becomes just as real as the furnished room “in the badlands west of Central Park” where Jack Lorey awaits her return as “the lewd and searching shape of death.” “Torch Song” is also notable for its depiction of a woman who destroys the men in her life. This powerful female character, cruel if not always murderous, was often to reappear in Cheever's fiction.

At the beginning of 1947, Mary Cheever started teaching English at Sarah Lawrence two days a week. She liked the work so much that by summer she was planning to get a master's degree at Columbia. Family matters interfered with this plan. Susie went through the usual childhood diseases. When she had chicken pox, so did her father, and Mary nursed them both. Then it was clear by the fall, when she was to start at Columbia, that she was pregnant again and the master's degree was abandoned. On May 4, 1948, her thirtieth birthday, Mary gave birth to Benjamin Hale Cheever. A “fine looking, dark-eyed lively boy,” he was very unlike Susan as a baby. John was delighted with his arrival, and from the beginning Mary felt a powerful bond to her first son.

In the meantime, work had been going forward on a stage adaptation of Cheever's “Town House” stories. By the fall of 1948, the play was finally ready to open on Broadway. Bernie Hart had purchased the rights as early as January 1946 and put Herman Mankiewicz to work on the script. When this effort failed to pan out, Hart sold the rights, and the play that opened on Broadway was written by Gertrude Tonkonogy, staged by George S. Kaufman, and produced by Max Gordon. With such professionals behind the venture, Cheever had hopes that
Town House
would make his fortune.

In Boston, where the play had its out-of-town opening on September 2, the auspices looked good. Cheever went up in advance to generate hometown author publicity. In a long article he wrote for the
Boston Post
, he radiated enthusiasm for the production. Tonkonogy had done an excellent job of playwriting. Mary Wickes brought “a richness far beyond the ordinary pathos of comedy” to her portrayal of the awkward and shy intellectual housewife. June Duprez was “just right” as the beauty, and Hiram Sherman and James Monks materialized onstage exactly as he “realized them in the stories.” Max Gordon called it “one of the funniest plays I have ever had the honor to produce.” The Boston audience, full of family relations and former cleaning women, seemed to agree. There was optimistic talk about a big Hollywood sale. At this stage, according to Cheever, Kaufman decided to add more jokes, with disastrous results.

Opening night on Broadway was an absolute frost. The Cheevers went with the Ettlingers and Gus Lobrano, and “the play was terrible,” Don recalls, “not at all what John had in mind.” The set, which “cost as much to build as a twenty-room house with running water,” was magnificent. Mary Wickes was excellent. Otherwise the play was a disaster.
Town House
closed on September 30, after twelve performances. Cheever made fifty-four dollars. The producers lost a hundred thousand.

Even this experience was not a dead loss, however. In three separate stories, Cheever drew on his observation of the New York theatrical scene. All three contrast the simple unpretentiousness of ordinary people—twice playwrights from the country, once a teenager without affection—with the glossy world behind the footlights. One of these, “The Opportunity,” sold to
Cosmopolitan
for $1,750 in July 1949. That was “a good deal more than I've gotten before,” he wrote Edith Haggard of Curtis Brown Associates, the agents he had just hired to replace Lieber. He was still free-lancing precariously, without a successful novel or play or movie sale to bolster the family finances, and he stuck to his daily writing regimen in the basement.

Often he talked with the men who worked in the building—the super, the doorman, the handyman—as he made his daily way to his subterranean cubbyhole. Never were these men so unified and happy as on the day after Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey in November 1948. Every inch a Democrat, Cheever sat around in the basement with the building employees, gleefully exchanging stories about how stricken the Republican apartment dwellers looked.