John Cheever (41 page)

Cheever consoled himself with sex, both real and imagined, as well as with liquor. He seduced one of Mary Dirks's Briarcliff drama students, “an enchanting kid and very experienced.” He saw Hope Lange whenever he could, and when he couldn't he daydreamed about her, about Aileen Ward, and about a new enthusiasm, Shana Alexander. Shana met the Cheevers through Zinny Schoales. In her teens she had been a copygirl and a reporter on
PM
, when Zinny was running the financial side, and they had become friends. In 1970, when she was editing
McCall's
, Alexander rented a house near Sleepy Hollow Country Club for weekend rendezvous with her lover H.A.L. (Harry) Craig, an Irish poet and screenwriter. Both of them liked to drink, and Cheever naturally gravitated toward them. People who drink need other people to drink with.

Besides, he was very taken with her, and flirted with her “more or less outrageously,” though her liaison with Craig could not have been more obvious. Shana liked Cheever a lot, all the same. He was cute and he knew it, and that was attractive. He was funny, and that made for wonderful company. He struck her as a small man with no hangups about his size, “a little nut-brown guy with twinkling eyes who was sparkling all the time.” He promised to write her “A Pure and Beautiful Story” for
McCall's
, and she asked him down to the Hamptons to discuss it (the story was never written). “I thought he was marvelous,” she said, but there was no physical relationship between them. “Those are not the sorts of things one forgets,” she pointed out.

She was in any case admitted to his gallery of dream girls. Cheever often said that he “adored” women, meaning women who were good to look at. He would never have anything to do with a woman who was not beautiful, he said. And he liked women of a certain type, Candida Donadio observed: slim, elegant, nicely featured, blondish, not tall, women with quiet voices. Moreover, he was strongly attracted to women who were not only beautiful but accomplished. One writer at Yaddo he found singularly homely. “And her career has been a disaster, too,” he said of her, as if to prove a point. The women he admired combined good looks and a successful, often publicly noteworthy, career. This was the basic pattern with Hope Lange, Aileen Ward, Shana Alexander, Anne Palamountain, Sara Spencer, and Sophia Loren, and—later—with painter Susan Crile and Lauren Bacall. Each of them in her own way outperformed his mother, who had become a career woman perforce. In his imagination—and sometimes in his conversation—they became his lovers. And he imagined, too, that they might give him a mother's nurturing love. In a dream, for example, he envisioned himself ill, in Rome, with Aileen Ward nursing him back to health.

At times, half in fantasy, he conjured up a divorce from Mary and a subsequent dream-girl marriage. In 1971, he called daughter Susan one night and told her he was planning to marry “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Hope Lange, but nothing came of it. He spoke openly of Hope as his mistress in social gatherings, even when Mary was present and within earshot. She seemed not to care. One day when he went into New York to see Hope, he returned home for dinner to announce that he loved two women. That was all right with her, Mary said. She was never possessive or jealous about him. If she could help it, she did not intend to let herself be hurt.

As the marriage ties weakened, Cheever formed an ever closer bond with his younger son. In the fall of 1970, Susie and Rob stayed briefly at Cedar Lane upon their return from fifteen months in Spain and England, but soon they moved to a rented house in Armonk, and she began her writing career as a reporter on the
Tarrytown Daily News
. Ben, though living nearby, was virtually separated from his family for the nine years following his marriage in 1969. His wife, Linda, thought he had been given short shrift by his father: when Ben did come by the house, often it was to ask for money. Fred was the only child at home. He and his father spent a lot of time together.

Their relationship was a curious one. John depended on his shy and pudgy son at least as much as Fred did on him. He was as generous with his time as any father could be. They tossed balls back and forth. They sat together and watched television. Once a week in the good weather, they walked the six-mile round trip to the Croton dam accompanied by Hoover, the imaginary dog the boy invented when Maisie went to live with Rob and Susie. On Sundays they occasionally cooked dinner, fashioning Beef Wellington out of a recipe in the
New York Times Magazine
or a ham soufflé according to the instructions in the Waring blender book. They swam at Sara Spencer's pool and went skating on her pond. They did almost everything together.

In time, Fred assumed the function of protecting his father against his baser instincts. When they went swimming, the fourteen-year-old cautioned his father not to swim naked: people might come along. When he came home from Hackley and a losing soccer game, tired and upset, and his father was drunk and nasty, Fred yelled at him over the dinner table and struck him in his chair afterward. The physical threats all went one way, for John was in terrible shape from alcohol and Fred was much the largest of the Cheevers. Later, when Suntory sent Cheever a case of their whiskey, Fred poured most of it down the drain. The boy proved his usefulness time and again as parent to his own father.

Though Cheever had very different relations with each of his children, it is noteworthy—as Fred points out—that they all stand up for him. “He always cared enormously, even in the worst times with Ben.” Moreover, he “valued family life more than anyone I've ever known,” Fred observes. Only in domesticity could he feel a kind of redemption, a sense of his own goodness. Otherwise, as in his journals, he excoriated himself. In this connection, Fred cites a story about the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Universally regarded as a brilliant and wonderful man, Whitehead was talking to himself on a walk across campus when a student came up behind him and overheard what he was saying. The great man was cursing himself.

Fred traveled with his parents wherever they went during those years. In the summer of 1970, for instance, John took him and Mary along on his trip to South Korea as a delegate to the Thirty-seventh International PEN Congress. Updike was also a delegate to this meeting. The American delegation was seated next to the South Vietnamese. At one session, Updike recalls, Cheever turned to him and said, “with mixed alarm and delight, that the Vietnamese next to him was quite crazy.” For the most part the trip was a success. Each delegate was welcomed with silks and flowers and a three-volume edition of the speeches of General Park, the South Korean president.

At a geisha house Cheever was “washed, examined, kissed, and fed by hand.” At the National Theater, dancing girls performed for the visiting dignitaries, and Updike's noticing—upon close observation—that their knees were wrinkled inspired an exchange of doggerel with Mary Cheever.

Mary addressed Updike as an “eagley American” who

clasps the legs with languid hands

of dancing girls in Orient lands.

Ringed with the stars and stripes he stands.

The wrinkled knees beneath him crawl.

He squirms, he writhes, he climbs the wall

and on his dimpled plumpside falls.

Updike responded amiably:

I hope that I may never seize

Another pair of wrinkled knees,

But if I do, I hope that they

Are somewhere east of Oakland Bay.

The Cheevers stopped again in Japan on the trip home, ignoring the attractions of Expo to look at shrines and cedar forests and waterfalls. The three of them came home refreshed by their travels. The following year, John took Fred along on his second journey to Russia.

The Soviet Writers Union invited Cheever to represent his country at the Dostoyevsky jubilee in the fall of 1971. He and Fred arrived at Moscow in a blizzard. Asked if there was anything he'd like, Cheever said, “I'd really like a swim.” His Russian hosts huddled, and then dispatched him to Tbilisi instead of Riga, the headquarters for the Dostoyevsky observances. It was warm in Tbilisi, the leaves just beginning to fall, and father and son swam in the rivers of southwestern Georgia while speeches and concerts in honor of the Russian writer “raged in snowbound Riga.” At Homeric banquets the Cheevers were provided with vast quantities of wine and vodka, multiple toasts were offered, and it was considered impolite not to participate. “Heavy drinking was virtually a social obligation in that society,” Fred recalls. The boy, only fourteen, had more than enough to drink himself, and contracted a bad case of indigestion. During a half-hour interview show on Georgian television, he discovered—five minutes into the show—that an attack of diarrhea was imminent. He sweated out the half hour, literally, and then, desperate for relief, was led to a floor drain that manifestly would not serve his emergency.

As in 1964, Cheever was impressed by the Russians' hospitality, their fondness for ceremony, and their respect for the art of writing. At the home of the poet laureate of Georgia, the master of the house opened a bottle of wine before dinner and his wife took the bottle and sprinkled a bit of wine on the linen tablecloth as she moved around the beautifully appointed table. Her guests were not to feel embarrassed, she explained, should they spill some wine. From Georgia they flew back to the snow and cold of Moscow and Leningrad for the rest of their two-week stay. Cheever collected six thousand rubles in royalties there, and even after buying nine fur hats and five strings of amber, he had sixteen hundred rubles left. He could not take the money out of the country, and so when it was time to return, he offered to give it to Tanya Litvinov. She couldn't accept it herself, she said, but would take it to help publish samizdats, underground books and pamphlets. At this stage Cheever withdrew the offer.

As he later explained his actions, he feared that if he gave Tanya money for samizdats she might “end up on a Siberian manure pile.” In addition, it seemed to him, perhaps naively, that Russia was a country where writers were valued for their work, political considerations aside. He worried that the success of
Bullet Park
in that country was due to its implicit criticism of the contemporary American scene. “If you think that's what the book is about, we've both failed,” he told his Russian colleagues. That was not it at all, they assured him. They liked the book because of its evocation of the natural world, the way he described autumn leaves blowing in automobile headlights.

Undoubtedly, too, he was flattered by the attention paid him in Russia, the sense that he was more honored elsewhere than at home or in the United States generally. In Moscow, for example, he was taken to the Kremlin to meet Nikolai V. Podgorny, the president of the Supreme Soviet. (Podgorny kept a shoeshine machine in his office.) At the same time he well understood the repressive side of the government that honored him. In Leningrad he was less reckless on walks than he had been seven years earlier. He was probably a little afraid that the Soviets might kidnap him (and his son), and so “always said very nice things” about Russia, Fred thought.

In October, Cheever went to Chicago on his own, lured by the munificence of
Playboy
to its International Writers' Convocation. Sean O'Faolain, Alberto Moravia, and V. S. Pritchett attended from overseas, along with American columnists, political commentators, sportswriters, and at least one poet—James Dickey. The convocation, held at the Playboy Towers hotel, was “lavish, decorous, and a success.” The assembled writers feasted on caviar and rack of lamb, and drank all they wanted in the Writers' Lounge, kept open until 4:00
A.M.
each night. There were, however, no bunnies on display, since editorial director A. C. Spectorsky wanted to keep the meeting serious. Futurist Arthur C. Clarke, addressing the group, envisioned a society in which no one would go to the office. “The slogan will be, ‘Don't commute, communicate.'” Cheever nodded vigorously in agreement and sailed a paper airplane across the table.

He stole away from such heady thoughts long enough to have lunch with Dick Stern at the Pump Room, where they called Hope Lange from their table. (She wasn't home.) And he visited a steam room with Saul Bellow, where—he maintained—Bellow inspected Cheever's parts while he studiously avoided gazing at Bellow's. The rest of Bellow looked more Olympian, he admitted, but he suspected Saul “was trying.” Both enjoyed the steam bath visit. As Bellow observed, “writers don't get a chance to talk with each other naked very often.”

Also in the summer of 1971, Cheever began teaching a class in creative writing at the Ossining Correctional Facility, a.k.a. Sing Sing. To begin with he had no idea of gathering material for a novel. He decided to teach at Sing Sing, he said, because someone at a party had said there were two thousand prisoners and only six teachers. Besides, “it was closer than Princeton.” On his first day, Cheever was bused inside the prison walls, escorted by guards through the key room and past five clanging gates, unlocked and locked behind them, to a classroom with a yellowed American flag where twenty inmates awaited him. Two of them showed talent, and one of the two, Donald Lang, vividly recalls that first day.

To begin with, Lang was pretty antagonistic. “Who in hell is John Cheever?” he wondered. When Cheever showed up, Lang was disappointed in the way he looked and annoyed by the way he talked. Writers were supposed to look like Hemingway, or at least act like him. Yet here was this little guy with what sounded like a phony accent. “One expects,” Cheever intoned New Englandly, and Lang thought to himself, “One
what
?” Was this guy showing off? And why in hell was he coming to Sing Sing now after twenty years in the community? Was this some kind of fashionable thing to do?

Almost immediately, however, Cheever earned the inmates' respect by showing up for class after the riots at Attica, another New York state prison thirty miles east of Buffalo. On September 9, about half of the twenty-two hundred prisoners at Attica revolted, seizing forty guards and others as hostages and taking control of four out of five cellblocks. Four days later, after some highly publicized negotiations with radical figures like Bobby Seale and William Kunstler serving as go-betweens, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state troopers to attack. Behind a blanket of tear gas, they laid down a fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire. Thirty inmates were killed, and two hundred injured. Nine of the hostages were also gunned down. Word of the riots at Attica circulated on the Sing Sing grapevine, and things were very tense there. The prison population of Sing Sing was then about 65 percent black, and there was a sense—Lang said—that if the blacks found a leader, they'd riot. The place was a powder keg about to go off, and the authorities imposed extremely tight security. Yet Cheever came in to teach right after Attica, and Lang “had to admire” him for that.