John Cheever (28 page)

A more remarkable story, technically, is “Clementina,” told from the viewpoint of an Italian
donna di servizio
who goes to work for an American family in Rome and then accompanies them to the United States. For Clementina, it is the American way of life that is foreign to everything she has known. She is enchanted by all the labor-saving devices: the washing machine and the dishwasher and the electric frying pan and the
frigidario
and the deep freeze and the electric eggbeater and the vacuum cleaner and the orange squeezer and the toaster and the TV. Listening to the machines doing all the work makes her feel powerful. She cannot understand, however, why the signora “who in Rome had lived like a princess, seemed in the new world to be a secretary” always talking on the phone and writing letters and raising money for good causes. The religion of the New World also bewilders her—the priest gives her “the tail of the devil for not coming to church every Sunday of her life” and people put up a tree for the
festa
of the
Natale
and they take collection three times every Mass.

The comforts of American life prevail, however, and Clementina decides to marry an old
paisano
named Joe in order to remain in the United States. Her American master tries to stop this marriage, for she does not love Joe and he thinks it is wrong for her to marry without love. Clementina is more practical than that. He talks like a boy with stars in his eyes, she tells the signore. “If people married for love, the world … would be a hospital for the mad.” So she marries Joe, makes him happy and herself comfortable, and one day when she meets her former signore at the racetrack she finds that he and the signora have divorced. “Looking into his face then, she saw not the end of his marriage, but the end of his happiness. The advantage was hers, for hadn't she explained to him that he was like a boy with stars in his eyes, but some part of his loss seemed to be hers as well.” At that moment the Italian maidservant and her American signore share a moment of recognition, linked by their common humanity across the barrier of alien backgrounds.

The actual experience of Iole Felici, the nursemaid-cook who came to the United States with the Cheevers, bore some resemblance to that of Clementina. She left a lover behind in Italy, but he died soon thereafter, and she wanted to stay in this country. One evening at dinner, she spoke of the possibility of marrying Saverio (Sam) Masullo, an old gardener who worked on the Vanderlip estate. If she did marry him, Iole said, she would clean his house and cook but would not make love to him. At this news Cheever became angry. If not love, marriage at least demanded cohabitation, he declared. She would have to sleep with Sam. On that understanding they got married, and despite occasional fights—once Iole persuaded Sam to sign a document promising not to be jealous—they stayed married for the remaining twenty years of Masullo's life. Though she had a house of her own, Iole remained an extraordinarily loyal and vigorous family retainer to the Cheevers. Federico especially was devoted to her, and she to him. He saw so much of her during his first few years that he grew up bilingual, with a preference for Italian. “See the horsie,” his father would say. “
Non c'e un
horsie,” the two-year-old would correct him. “
C'e un cavallo
.”

Shortly after their return from Italy, the Cheevers began to consider different living arrangements themselves. They had been tenants at Beechwood for nearly a decade, and Mary yearned for a house of her own. “I wanted it so badly,” she recalled. “I was tired of living in someone else's playpen.” Besides, John was sensitive to some people's assumption that he was the pet writer of the rich Vanderlips, who rented him his outbuilding at reduced rates. “He hated that,” Mary said, and so did she. On the other hand, as a child of the Depression he could hardly forget the disaster that had befallen his parents in Wollaston. He regarded a mortgage as a pernicious document, and they certainly did not have enough money to purchase a house outright, particularly in upper Westchester. Houses in Saratoga Springs were much cheaper, and periodic visits to Yaddo to attend board meetings and to write revived his love affair with the place. He began to lobby for a move to Saratoga.

It seemed to Cheever that nothing about Yaddo ever changed. Even the flowers in the vase looked as they had when he first came there in 1934. He was treated rather like the lord of the manor. “Only dogs, servants, and children know who the aristocrats are,” he joked, and imagined the help saying, “Master John's back, Master John's back.” Over the years he developed close relationships with practically everyone who worked there—with Elizabeth Ames herself, who defied nature by continuing to bloom as she grew older; with Pauline (Polly) Hanson, for many years Elizabeth's assistant; with caretaker George Vincent and his wife, Helen; with Minnie Woodward the laundress. It became a ritual for him to invite Minnie for a dinner date at the New Worden Hotel. There she would say strange and wonderful things. “People don't realize how intelligent and loving cows are,” she said. “Just look in their eyes.” She also told John about the carrot shaped like a man's parts, and that anecdote went into
The Wapshot Chronicle
.

Another
Chronicle
episode led to some embarrassment, first at Beechwood and then at Yaddo. Mrs. Vanderlip, reading about Moses clambering over the roofs of a mansion to make love to Melissa, assumed that Cheever was writing about
her
mansion, and became rather upset with him. At the Yaddo dinner table, Cheever spoke about this, and of how he had insisted to Mrs. Vanderlip, “No, no, that is not your place at all, that's Yaddo,” only to realize that Elizabeth Ames was regarding him narrowly. At this point he rapidly reversed himself. It had been Beechwood all along, he assured Elizabeth, and he'd only mentioned Yaddo to quiet Mrs. Vanderlip's suspicions. Elizabeth seemed satisfied, and in any event Cheever was a favorite with her.

When he did go to Yaddo, he usually came back home restored. In the winter of 1959, for instance, he wrote two stories in two weeks, skied every afternoon, and put on ten pounds. There was no place he worked better: he followed a schedule, and there were no interruptions. Invariably he was the first one down for breakfast, which he would eat very quickly with very little talk. Then he went back to his room or studio to write. At one-thirty or two in the afternoon, he emerged and, in most weather, made the six-mile-round-trip walk into Saratoga to buy a bottle. “John goes into town and out to deserve his pint,” Elizabeth said, and that was all right with her too. Alternatively, depending on the season, he got his exercise and put “some blue sky” back into his head by skiing or swimming in the afternoon. Then there was conversation at dinner, Ping-Pong afterward, a spell of reading, and early bedtime.

This routine invariably helped him work, but it also separated him from his family. At Yaddo he missed the disturbances of home—a dog in his lap, a baby in his arms—and at Scarborough he missed the fields and the quiet. If they only lived in Saratoga, he came to believe, he could combine the pleasures of home life with the pleasures of writing. So he looked around and found an inexpensive old three-story house on Union Avenue with a porte co-chere out front and a carriage house in back where he could work. The whole family drove up one sunny day to see the house, and drove right back to Scarborough. The schools were not good enough for the children, Mary thought. The house was in sad repair. They did not move to Saratoga.

In the summer of 1959, Dr. Winternitz fell desperately ill at Treetops, and Mary made a number of visits to his bedside during a long siege marked by sudden relapses and temporary recoveries. By this time the relationship between Cheever and his father-in-law had soured. Mary's father, John decided, was a tyrant whose dark spirit compromised their marriage. “I have come to think of Winter as the king of a Hades where M. must spend perhaps half of her time,” he confided to his journal. “There is no question that he is a source of darkness in our affairs.” At midsummer he escaped the vigil to attend a writers' congress in Germany and revisit Italy. Everything in Europe looked healthy and cheerful. An old lady sold roses in a Frankfurt doorway. Little girls in dirndls gathered mushrooms near Kitzbühel. Alan and Lucy Moorehead put him up in their beautiful house in Asolo, and sent him off to swim in the Adriatic at the Lido. Finally he returned to Rome, this time as a guest at the American Academy, where he had felt himself snubbed two years earlier. On the flight back an engine caught on fire, but nonetheless the trip had been invigorating. Why did he like Italy so much? Mike Bessie asked him. “When I walk down Fifth Avenue,” Cheever replied, “I know all the faces. She's Vassar '46, and I know where and how she lives. But in Rome it's not like that at all—the faces are mysterious, and fascinating.”

In September, Mary's father died, and with the passing of that dominant male figure John assumed full responsibility for his wife and family. What he and Mary wanted out of life was what most middle-class Americans wanted: a comfortable and fulfilling life for themselves and the best possible opportunities for their children. A house of their own was part of the package, and so were the best schools for Susan and Ben and Fred. In all three cases, this meant expensive boarding schools and private colleges. The advertising man and the investment banker and the network executive managed to provide these advantages, so why shouldn't he? This was not the sort of existence, to be sure, that most American writers were able to or in some cases even wanted to achieve. But Cheever was convinced—and by his example demonstrated the validity of his conviction—that a real writer did not need to be “an outlyer, like a gypsy” (Ernest Hemingway's prescription). “Genius did not need to be rootless, disenfranchised, or alienated,” Cheever persuaded young poet Dana Gioia by example. “A writer could have a family, a job, and even live in a suburb.” But he could not do these things—at least Cheever could not—without arousing powerful tensions. A conventional life imposed restrictions, and even as he forged his bonds he was driven to loosen or untie them. In addition, he was almost always under severe financial pressure. This strain was directly involved in his looming confrontation with
The New Yorker
.

During most of their first twenty-five years together, Cheever and
The New Yorker
got along extremely well. Usually his stories were accepted, printed, and paid for as fast as could be expected, and three days later he would start getting appreciative and intelligent letters from readers. No magazine had better or more responsive readers, and few could have had better editors.

The redoubtable Harold Ross, for example, read through Cheever's submitted typescripts, littering the margins with his queries and suggestions. Often his queries were maddeningly literal-minded. If a character sat down, he would inquire, “On what?” If a story covered twenty-four hours or longer, he would want to know what had been eaten and whether people had slept. But there were also times when he supplied exactly the right nuance. In “The Enormous Radio,” Ross made an amendment that Cheever not only accepted but applauded. A couple discover a good-sized diamond on their bathroom floor after a party. “We'll sell it,” the husband says, “we could use a couple of hundred dollars.” Ross switched “dollars” to “bucks,” an “absolutely perfect” change.

For the most part, Cheever was very lightly edited at
The New Yorker
, since his copy came in clean and spare. William Maxwell, who succeeded Gus Lobrano as fiction editor, recalls discovering that Gus had not made a mark on “Goodbye, My Brother.” And Maxwell also remembers the day when he was lying ill with bronchitis and Cheever came by with a story and waited, talking to his wife Emmy, while Bill had the joy of being the first person in the world to read “The Country Husband.” In stories like these, ending with a flourish of celebration, Cheever seemed to communicate “a joyful knowledge that no one else ever had,” Maxwell thought. For many years their professional connection approached the ideal in editor-author relationships. The men were close friends, and each respected the work of the other. Cheever admired Maxwell's stories, and his novel of adolescence,
The Folded Leaf;
Maxwell counted it a privilege to edit Cheever's fiction.

Two things eventually compromised the relationship. First, when he was strapped for funds, Cheever often felt that the magazine was underpaying him. Second, Maxwell sometimes had to turn down a Cheever story, either because of its subject matter (
The New Yorker's
taste was genteel, and as time wore on Cheever wrote about everything under the sun), or because of his increasing drift away from realism and toward the fantastic, or—worst of all—because some of the fiction, written under the influence of alcohol, simply did not measure up. It was Maxwell's job to say no, and though for a long time Cheever tried to keep his editor-friend and the rejections separate, in the end he could not.

The problem of finances came up first.
The New Yorker
's policy has always been to keep a certain number of fact writers on the payroll, but to buy its fiction at space rates from outside contributors. Hence Cheever never had a salary from the magazine. Instead he was paid by the story, with annual bonuses depending on how much he had contributed during the year. There were times, however, when he became convinced that the magazine should support him the same way it supported its fact writers. But
The New Yorker
could not well afford to put all the fiction writers who contributed stories more or less regularly on a living wage, and it could not make an exception of Cheever without making everyone else furious. As it was, Maxwell understood Cheever's very real need for prompt payment and did what he could. Stories were paid for according to their length in print, but Maxwell would ask the accounting department to make an estimate from the manuscript and issue a check for 75 percent of the total, with the rest to follow after the story was set up in galleys. Cheever could also borrow against future work, like other regular contributors of fiction. He was paid an average of more than a thousand dollars for the 121 stories he wrote for the magazine. But these payments, which varied according to length and to a changing scale of rates, hardly sufficed to support Cheever and his family.