John Cheever (45 page)

In Ossining, Fred continued to serve as “his father's guardian.” He did not hesitate to be stern and got better results than anyone else. In August, Mary went to Treetops, and in her absence Cheever planned to bring Lucy Miner to stay at Cedar Lane. That prompted a vehement father-son dispute. “You can't do it,” Fred objected. “This is our house. Anything else is all right, but you can't bring her here.” In the end, and despite Cheever's insistent invitations, Lucy Miner chose not to come to Ossining.

In mid-August—shortly before John was due to go to Boston to teach—Fred took the most drastic step of all. “I'll leave home,” he threatened his father, “unless you go to the hospital to dry out.” Iole assured Cheever that Fred meant it, and on August 20 he was admitted to Phelps to withdraw from liquor. At discharge he was put on ten milligrams of Valium every four hours and a high-protein diet to keep him from drinking. This regimen did not last long.

Once Cheever moved to Boston, there was no one to prevent him from abusing himself in any way he wished. But he did not go there solely to escape his bonds. He went for the money, too. His income, like that of most writers, fluctuated widely from year to year. In 1973, when
The World of Apples
came out, the family's combined income (Mary usually contributed about ten thousand dollars annually) came to more than fifty-five thousand dollars. The next year, it was down to twenty-four thousand, less than half of the sixty thousand a year Cheever thought necessary to keep up house and family and send Fred to school. Cutting back, he resigned from the Century Club. And in negotiating with George Starbuck, director of Boston University's writing program, he drove a hard bargain.

Actually, Cheever asked for two things that the university rarely provided. First of all, he insisted that B.U. provide him with an apartment. After some difficulty one was located at 71 Bay State Road, only a few blocks from the campus. Three full flights up, the apartment was nicely furnished if rather stuffy. The urban neighborhood was far from the paradise that Iowa had been. A line of brick bow-fronts faced him across the street. Break-ins were reported several times a week. Lacking green fields, students sailed their Frisbees at traffic intersections. For exercise Cheever walked the six-mile round trip to the Ritz Bar downtown: past Kenmore Square where the wind howled around the corners of the embalming school, along Commonwealth Avenue with its statues of William Lloyd Garrison and George Washington, Leif Ericson and the President of the Argentine.

The other thing that Cheever asked for—or hinted at, rather broadly—was female companionship. At Iowa, he intimated to Starbuck, he had been “provided” with a graduate student who slept with him. Since that seemed to be the style these days, couldn't B.U. do the same? There was a twinkle in his voice as he made the point, but Starbuck felt sure he was serious about it and might have tried to make such an arrangement if there had been an obvious candidate in evidence. What he did not realize, at first, was Cheever's need for companionship of all kinds. Other visiting writers—John Barth and Arturo Vivante among them—had sought protection against too much collegial socializing. So Starbuck was surprised when Cheever remarked, in November, that he'd hoped to be introduced around.

Within the English department, he felt a certain affinity for poet Anne Sexton (“I'm not the living Sylvia Plath,” she used to insist), who stocked her handbag with airline liquor samples for department meetings, and for writer John Malcolm Brinnin (“I knew Cheever intimately but not well,” Brinnin cryptically observes), but no one became his close companion or drinking buddy. Beginning what he regarded as a new life, Cheever was avid for human intercourse, but the phone didn't ring. Inexplicably, he'd had the number unlisted.

Starbuck also realized too late how much Cheever craved public recognition. If he had it to do over again, Starbuck observed, he would arrange for Cheever to be honored by the Boston Public Library, make some outreach to the mayor, involve the Athenaeum. As did Willy Loman, Cheever needed attention paid, the more so since he was losing confidence in his abilities. He was working on a novel, he told an interviewer in October. The book would be his tenth and probably his last. Ten made a nice round number, and he would rather stop than publish drivel the way some older writers did. The trouble was, there was no second career for worn-out writers. “Unlike baseball players, they can't sell insurance. Unlike prostitutes, they can't be hostesses.”

His writing students in Boston, with a few exceptions, were not as talented as those at Iowa. Besides, there were far too many of them. Cheever was assigned two writing classes, one for graduate students and one for undergraduates: forty students in all. At first, he wrote Coates, his classes were “wonderfully responsive and contentious” and sometimes ran over three hours in length. By mid-October, that initial enthusiasm had dissipated. It was then that James Valhouli came to Boston to see him.

Valhouli, like Coates, did his doctoral dissertation on Cheever's work (Wisconsin, 1973), and during the 1974–75 academic year he was on leave from Bradford College in nearby Haverhill, Massachusetts. He planned to spend the time observing and taperecording Cheever's classes at Boston University, and then to write an article on the author as teacher. On Valhouli's first visit, however, Cheever had difficulty negotiating the walk to class after two hours of drinking Scotch. Inside, he was “visibly uncomfortable” facing grad students who knew very well he was drinking. Valhouli went to class with Cheever twice more, and then abandoned his project. It was too painful.

Valhouli continued to drive down to Boston periodically to see Cheever, however. He saw his role as that of a friend helping another man survive. He tried to cheer him up when Cheever spoke of his “crazy impulse” to throw himself in front of a car or described the dream he had of pallbearers carrying a coffin, with himself inside. He tried to get him to eat, for otherwise he was liable to drink indefinitely. He tried to get him to bed at a reasonable hour. Most of all, Valhouli provided Cheever with company, since he was “desperately lonely” and badly in need of companionship. By midwinter, Valhouli decided he couldn't keep up the relationship. It became clear that when he spent an afternoon and evening with Cheever, he couldn't get back to Bradford without risking an automobile accident.

Cheever also turned to Laurens Schwartz, the ablest of his writing students, for care and comradeship. Now a lawyer and author in New York City, Schwartz had been a student of Robert Penn Warren's at Yale and eagerly looked forward to working with Cheever. On September 25, after one of the first class meetings, Schwartz accompanied Cheever to a bar in a nearby hotel. Cheever's routine was already known there. The bartender—a middle-aged blonde in a short skirt—brought him a double vodka on the rocks as soon as he sat down and kept his cigarettes lit. Terribly depressed, Cheever began to sob. He was separated from his wife, he said, and couldn't function on his own. He had been living on oranges and hamburgers for seventeen days. He had no clean clothes. His apartment was dirty. On most weekends Mary came up from Ossining to take care of him, tidy up the apartment, and stock the refrigerator. She did not regard the marriage as finished, but rather in a state of disrepair owing to her husband's alcoholism. Except for her ministrations, he seemed unable or unwilling to care for himself. Schwartz was enlisted to help out: to fix instant coffee, walk him to class, tell him to go to the doctor.

It was clear that Cheever needed medical assistance. He drank and smoked steadily throughout his waking hours. His hands shook so violently it sometimes took him a dozen matches to light a cigarette. In his stupor he occasionally faded off into another world for a few moments. Once Schwartz removed a burning cigarette from his lap. It was very much like taking care of a child, and yet—as with his son Fred—Cheever thought of himself as father, not son. He often spoke about procreation. “I want seventy-two million children,” he said, and talented young men like Schwartz qualified as protégé-offspring. One night Cheever sat down at his typewriter and started revising a story of Schwartz's. “I'm going to get it published for you,” he announced, and he might have been able to do so. Even when drunk, he could produce “paragraphs of pure Cheever,” if not entire stories. But Schwartz wanted to be his own kind of writer. He ripped the paper out of the typewriter.

Early in October, Anne Sexton committed suicide. Though she and Cheever had not been close friends, her death deepened his depression. He threatened to resign, then thought better of it and stayed on through the worst days of his life.

On a few occasions Cheever saw John Updike, then living a mile away in Boston and separated from
his
wife Mary. “I tried to entertain him,” Updike recalls, “but he was hard to entertain.” They drove up to Andover to visit Cheever's son Fred and Updike's son David. They went to see a Garbo film at the Museum of Fine Arts, but it was sold out and instead they dined at Café Budapest, a place Cheever seemed enchanted by. They went, in Boston idiom, “to Symphony.” When Updike came to pick him up, Cheever opened the door naked, and for a second Updike was terrified that the door would close and lock behind him. Cheever needed help getting into his clothes, and lasted at Symphony only until intermission. “He was jumpy and needless to say foggy,” Updike remembers. Yet even at his foggiest, “a flash of wit and perception would remind you that it was John Cheever in there.”

Through the mails he issued calls for help. “I lost my vicuna coat in a bar,” Gurganus remembered him writing. “Three people had to bring me home.” “Death is—like drink—sometimes an irresistible temptation,” he wrote Coates after Sexton's suicide. “I sometimes feel that I am approaching an abyss.” He had to leave Ossining, he said, but hadn't arrived at a destination. Boston was terrible, he wrote Sara Spencer. His building had been robbed seven times. To the Friday Club, he was still more explicit. “This place is straight asshole,” he wrote them.

Over the Christmas break he came home to Ossining, but spent much of the holiday in Phelps Memorial with a recurrence of his drastically irregular heartbeat and severe shortness of breath. The symptoms were bad enough to confine him to intensive care for a few days. He was then moved to a hospital room whose window curtains were painted with poppies and foxglove. There, or so he imagined, a young priest knocked on his door. “I've come to give you Holy Communion,” the priest said. “Shall I kneel?” Cheever asked, the priest said, “Yes, please,” and he knelt on the cold linoleum in his hospital pajamas and received Communion. The priest then left, and Cheever never knew who he was or where he had come from. On release from the hospital, he immediately resumed drinking. He seemed determined to drink himself to death. When he went back to Boston, Susie feared she would never see him alive again.

The second semester in Boston was a disaster. Dean Doner, a writer and Boston University administrator, took Cheever to lunch one day. Midway through lunch Cheever mentioned that it was the date of
The New Yorker
's fiftieth anniversary party. “You're not going?” Doner asked in astonishment. No, Cheever bitterly replied, he hadn't been invited, though he'd written “more god-damn words” for the magazine than anyone else. He'd never gotten along with Shawn, and perhaps that was why he hadn't been asked. Or maybe people at the magazine were afraid that he'd cause them some embarrassment because of his drinking. (In fact, only full-time staff were invited to the fiftieth anniversary: no contributors, and not even spouses. Either Cheever did not know that, or did not want to know it.)

As they parted, Doner realized how down and out Cheever was. When he'd parked the car before lunch, Doner had dropped a quarter in the gutter, full of dirty water from a hard rain, and decided to leave it there. After lunch they went back to the car together, and Cheever said he'd rather walk home than get a ride. Doner then drove off, and looked back to see Cheever hunkered down, scraping around in the dirty water for the quarter. When Eddie Newhouse brought John a care package of food from Mary, he found him “sodden drunk,” reduced to crawling up the steps on all fours. Newhouse tried to get him to a doctor, but Cheever said not to bother, he was all right. One day, according to an autobiographical story, Cheever tried to put a hat atop the statue of the President of the Argentine on a walk down Commonwealth Avenue. The weather was frigid, but he wore no overcoat. “Gentlemen never wear overcoats,” his father had told him. Then he spied a bum drinking out of a brown paper bag and sat down with him. They were sitting there, drinking “some kind of fortified wine” out of the brown paper bag, when a policeman came along and threatened to arrest them. “Don't be ridiculous,” Cheever rather grandly said. “My name is John Cheever.” The cop was unimpressed.

When he finally did go to see a doctor, Cheever affected a similar hauteur. He arrived poorly groomed and sloppily dressed, Dr. Robert A. Johnson recalls, and could not articulate his words clearly, but what words they were! Even drunk, he spoke quite beautifully. Most of all, though, he was concerned that everyone should know who he was. He was not a common drunk, he insisted, not a bum. Whoever he was, Dr. Johnson told him, he would have to stop drinking or his cardiomyopathy would kill him.

In the last months in Boston he was unable to cope with his social and financial obligations. Sally Swope drove up with Mary to help clean the apartment, and asked John to a dinner party at her father's house in Louisburg Square. Cheever arrived at that distinguished address, slipped and banged his head on the newel post, and appeared at the dinner table bloody and dirty. He also stopped paying his bills. When the telephone man came to take the phone away early in March, Cheever ripped it off the wall.