John Cheever (29 page)

The trouble began, Cheever thought, with what he characterized as Harold Ross's feeling that too much money was bad for fiction writers—that if they stopped eating in cafeterias, they might become “prideful, arrogant, and idle.” Cheever strongly disagreed, and occasionally the issue flared up. One day in 1959 he marched into
The New Yorker
's offices on West Forty-third Street and managed to extract a sum of cash from treasurer Hawley Truax. Later that year the Maxwells came to dinner in Scarborough, and left hurriedly in the wake of a quarrel during which Mary declared, with fervor, that the magazine ought to give her husband more money. These disputes encouraged Cheever to explore other markets. In 1959, he published six stories in
The New Yorker
(including a first fragmentary section of
The Wapshot Scandal
) and one in
Esquire
. In 1960, he published two stories in
The New Yorker
and two in
Esquire
, one of them the superlative “Death of Justina.” Wherever he published his stories, however, the marketplace reminded him that only novel writing made sound economic sense.

Early in 1960 he applied for his second Guggenheim grant to help finance his second novel. Cheever's letter of application was remarkably brief: seven short sentences, half a page in total. His project was to write a novel, he declared, but he said nothing about what kind of novel. He was relying on the merit of his last two books—
The Wapshot Chronicle
and
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
—and on the eminence of his sponsors—Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, Ralph Ellison, and Cowley—to carry the day with the Guggenheims, and so they did.

The novel he settled down to work on was
The Wapshot Scandal
, a dark sequel to the cheerful
Wapshot Chronicle
. As Cheever immersed himself in the book, his sense of the world around him deepened and dimmed. Everywhere he encountered heedless, headlong change—change that in its rapidity and power transmogrified people as they moved from one abode to another, one job to another, one marriage to another, only to gaze emptily at the ruins of what had been their way of life. This constant mutability promised to rob us of our roots, and without these the wind could blow us away. In short, Cheever's cockroach returned, his cafard came back, his depression reassumed control.

In October 1960 he traveled to northern California to participate in an
Esquire
-sponsored symposium titled “Writing in America Today” with Philip Roth and James Baldwin. Each of these writers struck a pessimistic chord during his appearance on a college campus. Roth, speaking at Stanford, described a bizarre Chicago murder trial as an example of the difficulty of “Writing American Fiction” in a society where the awfulness of reality so often outstripped the imagination. Baldwin, at San Francisco State, was incandescent about the fire next time. “To be a Negro in this country,” he said, “is to be a fantasy in the mind of the republic … and where there is no vision there is no people.” Cheever, at Berkeley, deplored the “abrasive and faulty surface” of the nation during the last twenty-five years. “Life in the United States in 1960 is Hell,” he said, and the only possible position for a writer was one of negation. “The Death of Justina,” which came out the following month in
Esquire
, illustrated what he meant.

The characters in the story come from the Wapshot provenance, but Cheever chose not to subsume “The Death of Justina” in
The Wapshot Scandal
. It stands too well on its own as a devastating satire on contemporary life, and specifically, on the pervasive climate of commercialism. In an opening reflection, the narrator defines art as “the triumph over chaos (no less)” but questions his ability to achieve such a triumph in a world where “even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night.…” Moses—presumably Moses Wapshot, though the last name is not used—is at work writing commercials for Elixircol when he hears of the death of his wife's cousin at their home in suburban Proxmire Manor. His boss insists that Moses finish the commercial before he takes the train home, and in response he submits a horrendous parody of modern advertising copy:

Are you growing old? Are you falling out of love with your image in the looking glass? Does your face in the morning seem rucked and seamed with alcoholic and sexual excesses and does the rest of you appear to be a grayish-pink lump, covered all over with brindle hair?… Is your sense of smell fading, is your interest in gardening waning, is your fear of heights increasing, and are your sexual drives as ravening and intense as ever and does your wife look more and more to you like a stranger with sunken cheeks who has wandered into your bedroom by mistake?

If any of these things are true, Moses writes, you need Elixircol, “the true juice of youth” that comes in a small economy size for seventy-five dollars and a giant family size at two hundred and fifty. It's a lot of scratch, but you can always borrow from your neighborhood loan shark or hold up a bank. He sends this copy in to his boss and catches a train to Proxmire Manor, where he finds a village government trying to legislate against death much as Elixircol purports to stave off the process of aging.

Moses and his wife live in Zone B of Proxmire Manor, where her cousin Justina has just passed away, illegally. The laws of the community specify not only that you can't have a funeral home in Zone B (two-acre lots) but also that you can't die there. Dr. Hunter, who gives Moses this information, suggests that he put Justina in his car and drive over to Chestnut Street, where Zone C begins and it is permissible to die. Otherwise, he'll have to get an exception to the zoning laws from the mayor. Moses next goes to see the mayor, who explains how strict zoning laws protect investments in their homes and is disinclined to grant an exception until Moses threatens to dig a hole in the backyard and shove Justina into it. That night, Moses has a dream in which a crowded supermarket becomes a modern Hell. The shoppers bring their wares to the checkout counters, where brutes push or kick them through the door into the “dark water and … terrible noise of moaning and crying” beyond. As he watches in his dream, “thousands and thousands pushed their wagons through the market, made their careful and mysterious choices, and were reviled and taken away.”

Once Justina is safely buried, Moses goes back to his office and fashions another mock commercial. “Don't lose your loved ones because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of Strontium 90 in your bones.… You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you.” His boss is not amused. Rewrite the commercial, he demands, “or you'll be dead.” At this command, Moses writes out the Twenty-third Psalm and leaves the office for the last time. In the end, then, he achieves a kind of victory, but at the cost of his job and in a society whose most symbolic gathering place, the supermarket, has been transformed into an updated version of the inferno.

From San Francisco, Cheever went to Hollywood for his first and only screenwriting job. He took the assignment to help finance the house that Mary had at long last found and persuaded him to buy. She had been looking around northern Westchester for three years, but most of the places cost at least fifty thousand dollars, substantially more than they were prepared to pay. Then in September 1960 Mary discovered a beautiful stone-ended house in a valley behind Ossining, with a brook and large trees and a field to scythe, and the search was over. The house with its six acres cost $37,500, and the problem of financing was not easily solved. Cheever was extremely uneasy about going into debt, and when he finally was persuaded to ask the bankers about a mortgage, they ascertained his occupation, considered his prospects, and folded their hands. To warm his reception with the bankers he referred them to
The New Yorker
, where legal counsel Milton Greenstein was anything but supportive. What made a writer think he could afford a house like that? he asked. At this juncture, Dudley and Zinny Schoales came forward to cosign the mortgage, the bankers smiled, and the Cheevers prepared to move the four miles north to their new home on Cedar Lane. First, though, there was a down payment to come up with. Mary contributed some funds from her savings, and the rest came from film producer Jerry Wald.

Two years earlier, in the fall of 1958, John had been prepared to go to Hollywood. The rumor was that David Selznick was going to call him about a screenplay for
Tender Is the Night
, but the phone call never came. In 1960, Jerry Wald did call, or rather Cheever's agent Henry Lewis let Wald know that Cheever was available, and so he was put to work on a screen treatment of D. H. Lawrence's
The Lost Girl
. In Lawrence's novel, a girl from England's industrial midlands meets and falls in love with a penniless young Italian and abandons her provincial roots to marry him and go to live in a bleak mountainous region of Italy. Cheever, with his recent exposure to Italian scenes, was a logical choice to try to transplant the story from the page to the screen. During five weeks in November and December 1960, he produced his treatment. This did not result in a motion picture, but Wald—an extremely energetic producer who often had half a dozen projects going at once—thought enough of Cheever's work to offer him two thousand a week to return. He said no. He had his own writing to do. Hollywood was not his cup of tea.

He was put up during his 1960 stay at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where the management never let him forget he was living in a suite once occupied by Mitzi Gaynor. (Twenty years later, John Belushi died in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night bungalow at the Chateau Marmont.) He did not lack for company. John and Harriett Weaver lived only a few minutes away, and the three of them had dinner together almost every night, either at the Weavers' or at a nearby Japanese restaurant. At Twentieth Century-Fox he was given a cubicle to write in, and a secretary who spent most of her time taking naps. He was delighted to see that Danny Fuchs, an old friend from the early days at Yaddo, was also on the lot. Over lunch, Fuchs advised him to treat Wald “like a demented child.” Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, colleagues from Astoria, relieved his distress at finding that alcohol was unavailable at the Fox commissary by sharing their emergency rations of gin. At a party at Wald's house, a disembodied voice from beyond the closed front door asked Cheever to state his name, please. He refused, and banged the contraption that issued the request with his shoe. At another party—the highlight of his trip—he met and kissed Peggy Lee, a singer he greatly admired.

Hollywood, he feared, was “a sort of literary graveyard” that consumed talents like those of Fuchs and Weaver, Al Hayes and Harry Brown and John Collier. Yet it was homesickness that most afflicted him there as the Christmas season came on. The smog was terrible for the Santa Claus parade the day before Thanksgiving. Santa wore a mink beard, a choir sang “Joy to the World” as the roses bloomed in a climate—he was told—very like that of Bethlehem. A jazz combo played a “knockabout version” of “Good King Wenceslas.” It all seemed wrong somehow. He was glad to get home in time for a cold Christmas among the fir trees.

In February 1961 the Cheevers moved into the house in Ossining that was to be his home for the last twenty-one years of his life. Situated alongside the Hudson, Ossining derived its name from an Indian word for “stones.” The same word was responsible for the name of the town's most famous structure, Sing Sing prison. The township, ten square miles in area and thirty miles upriver from New York City, was decidedly not fashionable: “an unchic address,” in the words of
People
magazine, when compared with upriver estates and affluent bedroom communities to the south. The Hudson provided the town with its economic rationale, and during the nineteenth century a downtown community rare in Westchester sprang up to serve the needs of river commerce. Ossining was also unusual among the county's homogeneous suburbs because of its wide socioeconomic mix. The town was divided between the old-line professional white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who commuted to the city, the blacks who did the heavy work of the town, and the Italian-Americans who ran the shops and stores and served as guards at Sing Sing. In her poem “How Much Time Is a Village?” Mary Cheever traces the breach between the WASP commuters who live on the river bluffs and the proliferating black population downtown.

Wonderful vistas opened up from the bluffs: the Palisades far to the south, the vast span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, the triple-headed High Tor rising 850 feet above the river to the northwest, and the rugged Highlands farther north. Except for the Bay of Naples, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked from the heights at Sing Sing, “the world has not such scenery.” And there were also country roads and hills and trees and lakes and—for Cheever the most ravishing sight of all—the massive Croton dam and reservoir to gaze upon. “Nobody knows how beautiful this place is,” he said. His new house shared in the natural beauty, with the Hudson edging the west and the woods and fields and a brook still closer at hand. It rather looked, he thought, like Josie Herbst's place at Erwinna.

The Cheevers' house, Afterwhiles, is located near the Cedar Lane exit off Route 9A. Commanding an enclave of other early-American homes, the house itself features a pergola near the brook in front, and a stone terrace to the right. The woods beyond lead toward the river. Originally constructed in 1798, the house was redesigned in 1920 by the architect Eric Gugler. Irregular stones are massed to form the ends, with the rest clapboard. Inside there is no entrance hall, so that you walk into a dining room-living room at the left and a good-sized kitchen to the right. In one corner of the living room a sideboard displays the Canton china brought back by Benjamin Hale Cheever. A Paxton on the wall, depicting a woman on the veranda of a summer place, is on permanent loan from Arthur Spear. There's also a winter scene by Phil Rosenthal and a Seth Thomas clock. On the second floor is the master bedroom, a small bedroom, and a library-living room featuring a lowboy from Newburyport with a handsome tortoiseshell finish to the wood, a painting of John Cheever as a boy of eleven or twelve in an artist's smock, drawn by Aunt Florence Liley, and his grandmother's Chinese fan, under glass. The third floor contains two more bedrooms and a storage area. As his children moved away, Cheever shifted his workplace from one abandoned bedroom to another. In Ben's room he tacked a print of Thayer Academy to the wall. There is no trophy case attesting to Cheever's various honors and awards. Though the highway traffic roars by a few hundred feet away, the house on Cedar Lane seems more rural than suburban, an impression seconded by the active presence of the family's large and frisky retrievers. The place has a sense of rootedness about it.