John Cheever (46 page)

His classes turned into exercises in pathos. At one of the last sessions, a male graduate student contemptuously removed his shirt and strode around the room while Cheever—and the others—pretended not to notice. By the end of March it was clear that he could not go on, and Updike was recruited to meet his classes for the few weeks that remained of the semester. On April 2, Cheever left Boston. In his file at the university there were two unpaid bills from doctors, one from New England Telephone, and a humorous letter from Gurganus describing the gay scene in San Francisco.

Appropriately, it was his brother, Fred, who picked Cheever up and drove him to Phelps for detoxification. Now divorced and living alone on the South Shore, Fred had been supportive of his younger brother throughout his long siege in Boston. He called every day “to see,” as John put it, “if I am still alive.” At least once a week he took John to lunch, often with a third person accompanying them. Jane Cheever Carr, Cheever's favorite niece, and Rick Siggelkow, one of his undergraduate students, remember those lunches as pleasant occasions. John would order a roast beef sandwich and then ignore it in favor of his double martinis, but Fred did not chastise him. Instead he went out of his way to restore his brother's ego. Wasn't John a wonderful writer? he asked Jane. Wasn't he a marvelous teacher? he asked Rick.

Dr. Mutter admitted him to Phelps, where he suffered an episode of delirium tremens during the drying-out period. Then Mutter, Dr. Jewett, and Mary persuaded him to undergo treatment at the Smithers Alcoholism Center in New York City. The center, on East Ninety-third Street, is located in a palatial town house once owned by the flamboyant promoter Billy Rose. The house has an elevator, of course, and its huge octagonal bathroom designed for Eleanor Holm has been converted into a communal washroom for half a dozen men. Smithers was one of the first institutions to provide low-cost care for alcoholics, whether they could pay for it or not. When Cheever was there, his fellow patients included “freaks, cons, Irish policemen, whores, dismal gays … sand-hogs and seamen.” He shared a room with five other men. One was a German delicatessen owner who kept calling out in his sleep, “Haff you been taken care of?” Another was a lame black who brandished his knitting needles and shouted, “I can make anything under the sun with these.” To Cheever it seemed as if he were imprisoned, and he longed to escape.

The treatment cycle at Smithers runs twenty-eight days, and it took almost all of them for Cheever to acknowledge, first, that he was an alcoholic, and second, that he had to quit drinking if he wanted to survive. In the beginning he simply denied that he needed help, and linked the denial with expressions of grandiosity. He seemed more concerned with impressing others than with acknowledging his own vulnerability. His heart wasn't bothering him, he said. He had no trouble breathing. He wasn't depressed. Perhaps the others needed assistance, but he was perfectly able to deal with his own problems. After all, wasn't he a world-renowned novelist? He also seemed very class-conscious, and held himself aloof from the other patients. Criticized for this in group sessions, he became sarcastic but not overtly angry. It was difficult for him to recognize that no matter what he had done or where he came from, he was every bit as much at risk as the failed con man or the sandhog he beat at backgammon. Staff psychologist Carol Kitman urged him “to drop his John Cheeverdom and see himself as a vulnerable human who could easily be killed by his disease.”

In conferences with his personal counselor, Ruth Epstein, Cheever struck an attitude of emotional detachment. He admitted to no feelings at all, and she began to wonder whether he actually had any. The clue was the curious little chuckle he produced at inappropriate moments. He spoke, for example, of trying to teach Fred to ride a bicycle, and of how he must have been cruel with the boy, and then chuckled. This was his way, she came to understand, of disguising what was most important to him. It was not that he didn't care but that he didn't want others to know how much he cared. He would not even declare that he wanted to live rather than die, but in the end he decided he cared about that most of all.

His correspondence from Smithers traces a gradual awakening to his responsibility to shake off his addiction and survive. During much of his stay he insisted that he was at Smithers only on the orders of his internist and his wife, and that he resented the way he was treated. On Sundays, Cheever was released to go to church and spend the afternoon away from the clinic with family and friends. He visited Leonard and Virginia Field on April 26, and delivered a tirade against the cruelty of the group leaders at Smithers, who brutalized him before the others and did so in the worst possible grammar. Gradually, though, the experience of his fellow patients began to sink in. The delicatessen man finished his twenty-eight days and left; he had lost “his wife, his children, his house … his everything.” By the end of the third week, Cheever was beginning to accept his obligation to cure himself. “You can judge the worth” of this process soon, he wrote Laurens Schwartz on April 29. The following day he walked into Ruth Epstein's office and told her he'd never drink again. Only a few days before he had claimed that he could write as well as ever when drinking, and she had asked him, “But can you make sense of it the next day?” He'd been thinking about that, he said.

When Cheever was discharged on May 6, the prognosis at Smithers was “guarded.” The consensus was that he was so wrapped up in himself that there was no room for anything else. He was prepared to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but unless he arrived at some internal change and a more realistic self-appraisal, the Smithers staff was not optimistic about Cheever's chances. Few of them thought he would stay sober. They did not reckon with his strength of will or his delight in being alive. He went home to Cedar Lane, where everything was in bloom: “apples, dogwood, wisteria, lilac, me.”

REBIRTH

1975–1977

Cheever emerged from Smithers weighing twenty pounds less and feeling twenty years younger than he had four weeks earlier. It was as if he had been reborn, to begin a new life at sixty-three.

When John came home sober, Mary Cheever recalls, he was as happy as a prisoner released from bondage. “It was like having my old father back,” Susan writes, except that now he was kinder and more alert and more helpful around the house than before. His pattern of social behavior had to change, for liquor forever threatened to pull him into the abyss. On his second day out of Smithers, he warned himself against “the euphoria of alcohol when I seem to walk among the stars.” Yet drinking was very much part of the social world he and Mary continued to inhabit. The hardest part of the day came at twilight, especially the early-stealing dark of fall and winter afternoons that summoned up cocktail hours of the past. Once he had loved large parties; now he detested them. He and Mary sometimes arrived in separate cars, so that he could leave as the level of hilarity rose. At Jane and Barrett Clark's Christmas Eve party, he stayed only five minutes. When the Cheevers themselves entertained, he poured generous drinks for guests, but thought it would be “terribly nice” if they left early.

When Cheever quit drinking he quit taking pills: no Valium to get through the day, no Seconal to bring on sleep. Instead he drank large quantities of iced tea and chain-smoked cigarettes. (In the spring of 1979, he finally shook off his addiction to tobacco.) He chose not to sedate himself, and stuck to that choice with a remarkable fierceness of will. The choice, he knew, was really no choice at all, for by giving up alcohol he opted to live rather than die. But he reminded himself anyway that drink could do nothing to ease his daily passage, that it ruined his writing, that it robbed him of his dignity.

It was the drinking, he came to understand, that brought on his phobias about bridges and trains and crowds, if only to justify further drinking as a way of combating these anxieties. No encounter could be prepared for by liquor; the minutes beforehand simply had to be checked off. Nor did alcohol stimulate invention or liberate imagination; it only dulled the senses. Everywhere he detected the ill effects of drink on other writers' prose. “You can practically smell the bourbon” in Faulkner's worst work, he thought, and he sniffed it as well in the novels of contemporary writers he otherwise admired. And he repudiated the popular notion that great art derived from a torment that eventually led the artist to destroy himself. Certainly artists suffered, and perhaps more than most people. But that did not mean that they had to destroy themselves. Nor did they have to give up all their dignity, like the proverbial drunken poet at the campus reading. Hayden Carruth, himself a poet who long ago stopped drinking, asked Cheever why he quit so late in life. “At your age I think I'd have gone out loaded,” Carruth said. “Puking all over someone else's furniture?” Cheever answered, in wonderful condensation.

Cheever set joyfully to work upon release from Smithers. In Boston he had been unable to write much of anything. Updike recalls visiting his apartment on Bay State Road early in the fall and spying a page in the typewriter. It was the beginning of
Falconer
, describing the entrance to the prison. But “from month to month the page in the typewriter never advanced.” His muse, as Cheever said, had been in Portugal while he was in Boston. In May 1975 they were reunited on Cedar Lane, and he threw himself into the composition of
Falconer
. He was overjoyed to be working again, and enchanted with what he was producing. He had been throwing “high dice” since May, he wrote Denny Coates in October 1975.

Rising early and working until one or two in the afternoon, he streaked along on the book, seven pages a day, and finished it in less than a year. He knew from the beginning what he wanted to create: a novel about confinement “as dark and radiant” as possible. Yet there were blissful discoveries along the way. He awoke one morning and it suddenly struck him that Farragut had to escape. “He's going to get out,” he went shouting through the house. “Hey! Hey! He's going to get out.” Never had his writing given him so much happiness.

Still, there was the rest of the day and some of the night to get through without drinking. He kept himself busy with a variety of activities, some old and some new. As always he swam in Sara Spencer's pool, or Maurie Helprin's, or Sally Swope's, during the summer months. He skated not only in the winter—the ice in the winter of 1975–76 was the best in a decade—but year-round at a nearby indoor rink with Donald Lang and two black girlfriends of Lang's. Occasionally he hiked to the Croton dam with the dogs. He also discovered new forms of exercise such as biking and cross-country skiing. John Dirks was with him the day they went into Barker's and Cheever hauled the assembled bike on display up to the counter and insisted on taking it home with him. Thereafter he worked out two routes—one long and one short—for the daily bike ride. The long route, eight miles, took him by Marion Ascoli's estate on Teatown Lake in Croton, where he would stop to buy some of the brown eggs laid by the free-ranging chickens and to chat with John Bukovsky, who was in charge of the chickens and the farmland and the orchards. The first time he pedaled up, the German shepherd Fritz charged out of the lilac bushes and nipped at his rear. Thereafter Bukovsky knew Cheever was on his way when he heard his voice calling “Fritzie, Fritzie” soothingly.

Cheever began to grow vegetables of his own—beets, leeks, chard, spinach, tomatoes, beans—around the house on Cedar Lane. Roger Willson, who had grown up on a farm in Iowa, helped introduce him to the mysteries of gardening. “He loved to dig in the dirt,” Willson remembers. Willson also took him fishing out in Long Island Sound. Their first time aboard the
Klondike VI
, the FM radio played Chopin, and between them Cheever and Willson hauled in a hundred pounds of mackerel in two hours. It was not always like that. The next time, they left New Rochelle at midnight on a beautiful night, but when they reached open water the seas were rough. Nobody caught any fish, and almost everyone on board got sick. On other evenings the Willsons took Cheever to the monthly fights at the Westchester County Center in White Plains. He loved it all: the fat sportswriters with their cigars, the floozie who paraded around the ring with the placard announcing the upcoming round, the toughs in the audience, the local hero with the cauliflower ear.

Occasionally Cheever drove down to Yankee Stadium for a baseball game. More often he watched on television, taking part as a spectator in the national pastime his father had failed to instruct him in. He heard the right-field fans turn ugly when Yankee outfielder Roy White dropped a fly ball. He watched in fascination as Jim Lonborg pitched a one-hitter. He agonized when pitcher Luis Tiant defected from the Red Sox to the Yankees, for like “all literary men” he was a Boston Red Sox fan. “To be a Yankee fan in literary society,” he declared, “is to endanger your life.” It was the game itself that drew him along, a game that seemed almost perfect in its unfolding. At World Series time he could not be pried loose from the television. And other television shows became virtually obligatory viewing also: the Sunday-night
Masterpiece Theatre
(
Poldark
was his favorite), and the glamorous soap opera
Dallas
.

Two or three nights a week Cheever attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was a member of the Briarcliff chapter, but there was a meeting every night of the week in one or another of the communities nearby. He needed to go to these meetings, for he never got over the desire to drink. Simply saying the mantra “My name is John and I am an alcoholic” made him feel better. So did listening to the stories of others, as they traced their descent into degradation through drink. Cheever rarely spoke himself, instead smoking, drinking coffee, and sometimes striking up a conversation with someone who might prove to be a friend or confidant. In his new life he required new friends, and found some of them through AA.