John Cheever (23 page)

The fratricidal impulse inherent in the bloodied head, the slaughter by shuttlecock, and—as imagined—the near-fatal shove out the window crops up repeatedly in Cheever's fiction. Sometimes the dark brother is a real character, given a name, rivalrous over a girl or a piece of furniture. Sometimes he is an alter ego determined to obliterate all that is valuable and worthy in oneself. In either case the drive to destroy this other is strong, even though it is accompanied almost always by a corresponding compulsion to care for and nurture him. After the narrator in “Goodbye, My Brother” finally lashes out at his brother Tifty, he is beset by contradictory inclinations. He wants to do away with his saturnine brother, but he also wants to play the Samaritan and bind up his wounds—and that is what he does.

Such contradictory impulses warred within John Cheever as well. “Did you ever want to kill Fred?” his daughter asked him in a 1977 interview. “Well,” Cheever replied, “once I was planning to take him trout fishing up at Cranberry Lake, which is just miles away from everything in the wilderness, and I realized if I got him up there he would fall overboard, I would beat him with an oar until he stayed. Of course,” he added, “I was appalled by this.”

The destructive conflict of that impulse was reflected, less violently, in the duality of spirit that pervaded Cheever's suburban stories. Between 1953 and 1957 he produced the eight stories collected in
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories
(1958). All were located in the suburban Westchester he had come to know and to feel ambivalent toward. The stories were not
about
suburbia, Cheever would insist: they were about men and women and children and dogs who happened to live there. Yet often the emphasis falls on the contrast between their disorderly lives and their handsomely burnished surroundings. Suburbia aimed to shut out the ugly, eschew the unseemly, bar the criminal. But in Cheever's stories, Johnny Hake, who is broke, tiptoes across the neighbor's lawn to steal their money; Cash Bentley, who is almost broke, ritually hurdles the furniture when drinking and is shot dead accidentally by his wife; the philandering Blake is followed home on the commuter train by a girl he has seduced and made to grovel in the dirt before her; Will Pym, jealous of his young wife, knocks down Henry Bulstrode on the station platform.

Best of all among these stories is “The Country Husband” (1954). The story, as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in admiration, “is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic underlacings.” The thematic ties involve the contrast between the safe and static world Shady Hill meant to achieve and the occasional desperation of its inhabitants. The plane on which Francis Weed returns from Minneapolis crashes. He survives, but can interest no one—not even his own family—in the details of the crash. At a dinner party that night he recognizes the maid as a Frenchwoman he had seen humiliated—her head shaved and her body stripped—for cohabiting with German officers during World War II. But he does not tell this story, because the atmosphere of Shady Hill made such a memory “impolite”: “the people in the Farquarsons' living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world.” Weed next falls uncontrollably in love with the baby-sitter, but there is no one to tell about this (except the psychiatrist). In Shady Hill there is no precedent for moral turpitude or even the breath of scandal. “Things seemed arranged with more propriety even than in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Seemingly driven by perversity, Weed insults old Mrs. Wrightson, who as social arbiter of the community can keep his daughter from invitations to the assemblies. In an argument about this he slaps his wife, Julia, in the face. When she prepares to leave him, he comes to his senses, sees the psychiatrist, takes up woodworking to forget his passion for the baby-sitter, and—in the end—is joyfully restored to health and happiness.

He reaches his epiphany amid a jumble of seemingly disparate images of Shady Hill at twilight. Dinner is over and the dishes are in the machine. “The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.” A neighbor taking piano lessons begins to worry the
Moonlight Sonata
. A housemaid writes a letter to Arthur Godfrey. Francis Weed is building a coffee table in the cellar. Upstairs his son Toby takes off his cowboy outfit, climbs into a space suit, and flies from bed to floor, “landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.” Nearby, Mrs. Masterson attempts to send little Gertrude Flannery home, for everyone knows that Gertrude does not go home when she's supposed to. In the Babcocks' hedged-in terrace the naked Mr. Babcock pursues his unclothed wife. Mr. Nixon shouts at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. A miserable cat wanders through the garden, wearing a doll's dress. The last to appear is Jupiter, the Labrador, in a passage Nabokov cited as among his favorites. Jupiter “prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper.” Finally the narrator concludes, in a passage Cheever himself liked to recite. “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

Kings, elephants, and mountains in Westchester? Not likely, but then all the images Cheever has called up work against the grain of the community. The little girl who doesn't know enough to go home, the dog with the slipper in its mouth, the naked Babcocks as handsome as any nymph and satyr—all defy the conventional patterns of Shady Hill, and Cheever's admiration goes out to them. He wanted very much to become part of a community that would give him and his family a sense of security. But the real moments of joy came during flights of independence, brief journeys of defiance and escape that ended, usually, with a thump.

It followed that Cheever's political indignation could be aroused—as in the case of the vendetta against Elizabeth Ames—by infringements on individual freedom. During the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, he conceived a deep enmity for the junior senator from Wisconsin and his crusade against Communism and/or for personal aggrandizement. He also spoke out on behalf of Josie Herbst, who was temporarily denied a passport because of her political associations. “Nothing that she ever did or said would have led me, or now leads me, to believe that she was a member of the Communist Party,” his affidavit declared, and in due course the passport was granted. Meanwhile he wrote Herbst bewailing “the crazy thread of associative guilt” that had been used to tie her down. In Scarborough, he reported, he'd recently run across a native Fascist. This man, a fishing companion, was strongly opposed to a public library in the community. “I want my children to grow up and be healthy and patriotic citizens,” he said, “and they don't need books for this.”

It would be wrong to suggest that Cheever—whether in 1954 or at any other time of his life—became politically militant. He had liberal opinions and he rose to the defense of his friends, but he did not march or proselytize or talk in public on controversial issues. He did not know enough to do so. What he did know about was writing, and in the fall of 1954 he began a two-year stint as instructor in creative writing at Barnard College, Columbia's sister school. This job, teaching one class a semester, supplemented the family income and gave him an opportunity to articulate his ideas about the craft.

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, he went down to 117th Street to meet his class of bright young women. According to English department colleague David Robertson, Cheever “donned the mantle of an academic with seemingly eager interest as well as with grace.” He felt a certain pride in teaching on the university level, since he himself had not gone to college at all. Cheever learned the departmental ropes and “was entirely congenial” as a colleague, Robertson recalls, though as an instructor teaching only one course it was not incumbent on him to do so. Privately he was appalled by the politics of the English department, in which creative writing courses were regarded as unimportant, if not frivolous.

In the classroom, Cheever was a success. He spoke, after all, as an established writer. And he spoke without prejudice, rarely belittling the work of his students. Most of them thought he was wonderful. “He was a demon for style,” remembers Judith Sherwin, who took Cheever's “English II, 12. Story Writing” course in 1955–56. In workshop sessions, he wowed his students by taking dull sentences and making them shine with a touch of incongruity here, a gorgeous clause there. He also insisted on certain standards. Students should write about what they knew, he declared, and since most of them were young and (they thought) short on experience, they resisted this advice. Sherwin herself—now a writer and professor at the State University of New York in Albany—felt at the time that this stricture limited her too much, but has come to realize how right her instructor was. For by example as well as precept he showed how it could be done—how it was possible to “mythologize the commonplace” available at most any age. He was, Sherwin believed, the first of the magical realists.

Cheever also functioned to dampen his students' enthusiasm for the wild artistic life. Even in those beat-generation days he invariably came to workshops and individual conferences well groomed, and wearing coat and tie. Moreover, he backed up his conventional appearance and style with knowledgeable advice. They did not have to become bohemian to succeed, he told his young women students. Few of them, he suspected, had a real vocation for drinking. And, he cautioned, it did not pay to sleep with editors in hopes of getting stories or novels published. His students listened with respect if not in entire agreement; their teacher was a professional who was publishing one wonderful story after another in
The New Yorker
.

In 1955, however, his artistic progress was slowed by medical difficulties. As the new year arrived, Cheever was in Phelps Memorial Hospital recovering from pneumonia. Aline Benjamin recalls visiting on New Year's Day and finding John at work on the typewriter. “Nobody,” he said, “will give me any champagne.” Often he made his drinking a subject for humor, as in the letters he wrote to Phil and Mimi Boyer over the signature of Cassie, the family Labrador, which had been bred by the Boyers. (For a time during Susan's youth, the Cheevers did not keep dogs, for they were thought to aggravate her asthma. Later it was decided that she was allergic only to male dogs, and thereafter a succession of handsome, clumsy, and affectionate female Labradors lived with the family.) In her letter, Cassie said that on the trip up to Treetops there had been an argument over where they should stop for lunch, with the old man holding out for a Chinese restaurant where he could get a martini. This was all in good fun, but liquor and sex already posed real problems for Cheever. Two or three times in the early 1950s, he consulted psychiatrist Bernard Glueck, “complaining of difficulty with the handling of alcohol and homosexual concerns.”

At Thanksgiving, Cheever spent another holiday in the hospital, this time to have his “hindquarters rebushed.” A pleasant side effect of these periods of physical discomfort was that Mary always “took wonderful care” of him during recuperation. And despite his illnesses he found much to be thankful for: the light in the sky, the miracle of human love. Depression had often been his companion, he wrote Eleanor Clark at midsummer from Nantucket. Until recently, he'd been “an odd mixture of man and cockroach.” Now the cockroach seemed to have gone. In gratitude he joined All Saints Episcopal Church.

It was during that summer at Nantucket, too, that Harper & Brothers bought up the contract for his novel from Random House. As Cheever romanticized the tale, publisher Simon Michael Bessie sailed into Wauwinet on his yacht, stepped ashore with a flourish, and made the deal on the spot.

As Bessie remembers it, he and Cheever progressed from social acquaintance to an author-publisher relationship in two less dramatic steps. Though they had met previously at various gatherings, it was during a long lunch at Gerald Malsby's house in 1953 that they talked seriously for the first time. The subject was Saul Bellow, a writer Cheever greatly admired. Bellow was the only important American novelist, he maintained, who wrote neither out of sympathy with nor in opposition to the Puritan tradition. Up to that time, Bessie had thought of Cheever as an extremely gifted but perhaps overfacile chronicler of his middle-class world. Their conversation about Bellow struck a deeper, more illuminating note. Mike asked him to write an essay on the subject for
Harper's
magazine. Cheever did not: literary essays were not his sort of thing.

Still, that luncheon encounter cleared the way for a favorable response a few years later when Cheever wrote Bessie a note that went more or less as follows:

Dear Mike:

These old bones are for sale. I have a contract with Random House for a novel which I may never write but which I will certainly never write for them. The price of these bones is $2400, which is the advance I've taken against this novel.

“Where do I send the $2400?” Bessie replied.

The contract with Harper generously allowed Cheever up to five years to deliver his novel. And Bessie also agreed never, never to ask Cheever how the novel was progressing. He did not have long to wait, for Cheever was sailing along on his third and marvelously successful attempt to convert the saga of a New England family into book-length fiction. He'd given the book a new name:
The Wapshot Chronicle
. The career that looked so dismal in 1951 was shining bright, and there were still sunnier days ahead.

ITALY

1956–1957

Two prizes awarded Cheever's short stories presaged the success that lay ahead. In May 1955 “The Five-Forty-Eight” won the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award for the best short story of 1954. In January 1956 “The Country Husband” won the O. Henry Award for the best story of 1955. Cheever took pleasure in making light of these prizes. He had to go to Washington to accept the Benjamin Franklin one, for which he received a scroll depicting a naked man “scratching on a tablet.” Mary Liley Cheever, dying in a two-family house in Quincy, read the story about the Franklin Award in the
Quincy Patriot-Ledger
. “I saw it in the newspaper that you got a prize,” she told her son over the telephone. “Oh yes,” John said. “I didn't mention it to you because I thought it wouldn't interest you.” “Oh, you are so right,” she said. “It doesn't interest me at all.” Now “
that
was Massachusetts,” Cheever liked to say in telling this story.