John Cheever (34 page)

The Perrys were invited to lunch at Ossining to seal the bargain, and Frank Perry remembers being struck by two things about Cheever. The first was his drinking. Then a serious drinker himself, Perry recognized a pattern of behavior in his host that he associated with dependence on liquor. The second was his extraordinary vulnerability. Cheever seemed to him underprotected, almost naked, lacking in insulation.

More than anything else he wrote, “The Swimmer” is pervaded by this sense of vulnerability. Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of the tale, has lost everything: his job, his wife and four beautiful daughters, his friends, his youth. It is drink that has led to his ruin, and he emerges on the page directly out of Cheever's own self-disgust. Even his fondness for swimming parallels that of his creator, as he sets out one hung-over Sunday to negotiate the eight miles between the Westerhazys' pool and his own home in Bullet Park by way of a series of swimming pools, “a quasi-subterranean stream” meandering across the county that he calls the Lucinda River, after his wife. At first Cheever only hints at Teddy's plight. “He might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.” But as he traverses the watery stretches of the fifteen pools ahead and consumes half a dozen drinks, it becomes increasingly clear that things have gone wrong. He has a terrible time crossing Route 424, barefoot among the “beer cans, rags, and blowout patches.” He grows cold and weak as day lengthens into twilight, and the pool owners grow increasingly less glad to see him. His former mistress, Shirley Adams, lets him know she is not alone and refuses him a drink. Then it is night, and the stars above are those of Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia. “What had become of the constellations of midsummer?” he wonders, and begins to cry.

At the last two pools, he resorts to a hobbled sidestroke and hangs on to the side of the pool for support. He has swum the county, but is stupefied with exhaustion. He arrives at his own house to find it dark, with a rain gutter hanging down over the front door like an umbrella. Since the house is locked, he “shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.” So “The Swimmer” ends. It is a powerful story, and a moving one. Cheever read it in public more than anything else in his fiction. And it ranks, with “The Enormous Radio,” as one of his two most anthologized and analyzed stories.

In talking about “The Swimmer,” Cheever invariably stressed how difficult it was to write. He completed most of his stories in about three days, he said, but spent two months on “The Swimmer.” “There were 150 pages of notes for 15 pages of story.” Originally he had in mind a simple story about Narcissus. But it seemed absurd to limit the tale to a tight mythological plot. So he let Neddy Merrill free and “he swam in an immense number of pools—thirty of them!” Then he started to narrow it down “and something began happening. It was growing cold and quiet. It was turning into winter. Involuntarily. It was a terrible experience, writing that story.” He was proud of having written it, but it left him—“not only I the narrator, but I John Cheever”—feeling dark and cold himself. It was the last story he wrote for a long time.

“The Swimmer” has received as much critical attention as anything Cheever wrote, and deservedly so, since it is beautifully crafted and carries a powerful emotional charge. Usually he made fun of such critical commentary. The story had one Marxist interpretation and two Freudian ones, he asserted, all three of them nonsensical. The Marxist version: “See, in Capitalist America everybody has a swimming pool, and what are they? Unhappy.” Freudian Number One: the Narcissus myth, wherein Neddy courts his own image and finds death. Freudian Number Two: “the water is quite naturally mother,” and Neddy's quest is for a return to the womb.

In addition to “The Swimmer” and the title story,
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
contained the two best Italian stories, as well as “The Angel of the Bridge” with its indictment of the ills of modernity, “The Ocean” with its attack on inhumane business standards, and a number of stories—“The Music Teacher” and “An Educated American Woman” among them—in which the battle between the sexes is bitterly joined. Despite the upbeat ending of “A Vision of the World,” with its litany of heartening abstractions, the collection as a whole struck a note of melancholy. There were comic passages, as Orville Prescott pointed out in his
New York Times
review, but dismay was “omnipresent.” Prescott admired the subtlety of Cheever's craft in depicting suburban discontents. Others who wrote of similar characters and similar settings did so “in cruder terms, in terms of satirical exaggeration or of sociological documentation.” Cheever's fiction was not like that at all. Instead he “smiles, sighs and suggests a whole way of life (a hollow and uneasy one) with a few delicate touches. Why, he seems to ask, are well-educated, prosperous people living in the midst of comforts undreamed of even by their own parents so often lost and adrift?”

Cheever was in Russia when
The Brigadier
came out—he had been in Italy when both
Wapshot
books were published—and Russia was a revelation. He made the trip as part of an exchange program worked out by the State Department with the Soviet Writers Union. William H. Luers, then a political officer in the American embassy in Moscow, helped negotiate the exchanges that brought Edward Albee and John Steinbeck to visit Russia in 1963, and Cheever and John Updike in 1964. Cheever, traveling alone, came first, and Updike followed later, with their visits overlapping for ten days or so.

When he got off the plane in Moscow, Cheever heard what appeared to be a chant of “cheep, cheep, cheep” from the crowd. It was a delegation of Russian writers, led by Vassily Aksyonov, calling out “Cheever, Cheever” in welcome. He was delighted, and responded warmly to his Russian colleagues. Aksyonov was impressed by his vitality and his wonderful sense of humor. “He spoke to us as colleagues,” Aksyonov said. “He could identify with the problems—not the political problems, but the artistic problems—of young writers starting out.”

Without question it was Tanya Litvinov who became Cheever's closest friend in Russia. The daughter of the diplomat Maxim Litvinov and the English writer Ivy Litvinov, Tanya had recently finished translating most of the stories in
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories
for a Russian edition of Cheever's work and was, naturally, eager to meet the author. He was assigned like all eminent visitors to an official “minder,” Giorgio Breitburd, but soon managed to slip away from Giorgio and his tight schedule to spend more time with Tanya. They first met at a luncheon gathering of
Inostzannaya Literatura
(“Foreign Literature”) magazine, which had published a couple of his stories in translation. “Hidden behind a bowl of fruit the dreadful symmetry of which no one cared to disturb,” she remembers, the two of them carried on a sotto voce conversation while from the head of the table reverberated the “official boom-booming” about Soviet-American Relations, Culture, Common Aims, Literature in Its Humanitarian Aspect, and so forth. The head of the magazine, droning on about the deficiencies of abstract art, was speaking with indignation of a capitalist in the West who collected pictures made by driving a car over a canvas when Cheever “perked up and asked for the capitalist's address. Nobody seemed to mind.”

The next day he and Tanya had lunch at the Hotel Ukraine, where Cheever was staying. It was a high-rise building, sprawling and ornamental, whose lobby smelled like a barnyard. He called it Mother, or Mama Ookraenya, because he could spy the building from afar and “run under its apron when feeling lost or forlorn.” They discussed some of the difficulties of translation. Tanya wanted to know if the man in “Torch Song” escaped the ghoulish girl, but Cheever would not say. “He left it beautifully ambiguous,” Tanya realized, while “translation pants for certainties.” About more concrete matters he was more helpful. He sketched what an American mailbox looks like, for example, and a taxi meter.

Tanya also went along on Cheever's trip to Kornei Chukovsky's dacha in Peredelkino. Chukovsky (1882–1969), who had “discovered” Cheever and suggested that Tanya do some translations of his stories, was “the grand old man of letters” in Russia. He and Cheever hit it off immediately. Chukovsky said the American reminded him of H. G. Wells in the twenties and brought out a pen-and-ink drawing of Wells to prove it. There was a glow about the room only partly attributable to vodka. “We have no old men in America,” Cheever told her as they left. That night, Cheever was supposed to go to the Bolshoi, but he and Tanya stole off and walked and talked for hours. At the zoo she showed him where the iron railings had been widened by children squeezing themselves in for free. Cheever would have tried it himself if she hadn't discouraged the idea. They talked politics too, for Cheever had come to Khrushchev's Moscow and one week later left Brezhnev's. The rapid change in power bewildered him, and in her relief at a bloodless change of government Litvinov prophesied hopefully that this was the way it would be in the future: “
they
will be at each other's throats every four or five years, leaving
us
out of it.” That seemed rather a waste of effort, Cheever thought. Eventually she took him home to her flat to meet her husband, two of her daughters, and her dachshund. They shared some tomatoes and a piece of boiled meat.

When the Updikes arrived, Cheever spent much of his time with them. In fact, the two writers came to know each other well only during their ten days together on Soviet soil. To a literary public that sometimes assumes a close tie between them in age, background, style, and subject matter, it is worth noting that Cheever was almost precisely twenty years Updike's senior, that he came from Massachusetts and Updike from Pennsylvania, and that in their fiction Cheever's Shady Hill and Bullet Park resemble Tarbox of Updike's
Couples
only slightly and Brewer of the Rabbit novels not at all, and that no careful reader examining a page of their fiction would be likely to confuse a passage of Cheever's with one of Updike's, excellent as they both are in their different ways.

Because of the age difference and his admiration for Updike, Cheever was able to recognize and reward the younger man's work. He recommended that the prolific and talented Updike be admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. As a 1963 National Book Award judge, he pushed hard and successfully for Updike's
The Centaur
. At the NBA ceremony in the spring of 1964, the Updikes and Cheever—Johns and Marys both—began to get acquainted. The two writers got along well, and so did their wives. Mary Updike looked on Mary Cheever as something of a model of how to cope with marriage to a writing husband. In July, however, Cheever was annoyed when
The New Yorker
printed Updike's story “The Morning” on pages 24 to 26, in advance of “The Swimmer” on pages 28 to 34—even though, as he must have known, the magazine normally ran shorter stories ahead of longer ones.

During their time in Russia, Updike was unaware of any competitive overtones.
The Centaur
, like Cheever's book of stories, had recently been translated into Russian, so that both writers were well known to their hosts and both had brought along a good many copies of their books to distribute as gifts. To the extent that any rivalry surfaced between them, it involved a humorous competition to unload as many of these autographed copies as possible. In almost every respect, both John and Mary Updike were charmed by Cheever. His brisk humor “lit up the potentially gloomy Soviet surroundings” and made October in Moscow “as gay as an April in Paris,” Updike said. He communicated a kind of restless energy throughout, pacing crowded rooms and suddenly departing for long walks that struck the Updikes as brave if not foolhardy. In Leningrad, the three of them were left mercifully unattended for a morning, and then—Mary Updike recalls—“we behaved like children let out of school, comparing notes, griping about the system, talking to the bug, gossiping, feeling homesick and missing our children.” When they said goodbye to Cheever, the Updikes felt bereft.

Both Updike and Cheever were effective cultural ambassadors, Luers felt, and Cheever the more so because he carried “very little ideological baggage.” Lacking these impediments, Cheever was captivated by the Russian people. From Moscow his itinerary took him around the country. Everywhere he saw families on weekend outings, collecting ferns and flowers. Poets unselfconsciously recited their work, singers sang when asked. He shared with the Russians he met “a taste for hard liquor, enthusiasm, and demonstrativeness.”

The most demonstrative of all was the flamboyant Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Like a dynamo, the poet enraptured adoring audiences who came to what were tamely advertised as poetry readings but actually combined—in Mary Updike's phrase—“the more moving elements of theater, opera, concert, and church.” A matinee idol to these crowds, Yevtushenko was rarely offstage at any time. He carried himself like the commanding figure he was. In a Communist society, he was treated like nobility. He and Cheever, very different in his “muttery Waspish manner,” were nonetheless taken with each other. “I think that John was amused by the buccaneer in Yevtushenko,” John Updike speculates, “and Zhenya (as we called him) was engaged by the debonair raffish side of John” (or Chon, as Zhenya called him). With his quick ear, Cheever soon developed an imitation of Yevtushenko based on his theatricality and his ego that could “crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.” Yevtushenko asked him how many letters he got from readers. “Maybe ten a week, twelve a week, something like that,” Cheever said. “I get two thousand a day,” Yevtushenko said. Still, Cheever felt a genuine affection for the poet that was not always shared by his fellow writers in Russia. “Yevtushenko is nothing but a flirt,” they told Cheever, “in your case, a very successful flirt.”